After having disconstructed the metaphor of mirror of Nature and constructed the metaphor of webs of believes, Richard Rorty has claimed metaphor is the third methods of reweaving webs of believes besides perception and reasoning.

Extended research on belief network retrieval model

To resolve the problem that original model does not use relationships among terms, this paper gives definition of optimal synonym,similar concept,and concept similarity by using synonym for IR and word similarity,presents arithmetic of concept similarity and query terms synonym based extended belief network model by using aforementioned definitions,discuse.

Combining distinct sources of evidential knowledge to expand belief network for information retrieval (IR) is a current and important research direction.