AN APPROACH TO ADVANCED COMPUTER-BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN THE FIELD OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE Ⅰ.MAKING A DATA BASE IN THE FIELD OF CHINESE HERBAL MEDICINE

Traditional Chinese Medicine has endured manypractical tests and has cured the sick and saved livesfor a long time.It is too broad a field to be dealtwith except by an expert.Therefore,researchersneed much time to find necessary data.This reportproposes a scheme for information retrieval whichwill be advanced enough to reduce the need forhigh trained professional experts for “Chinese HerbalMedicine”and attempt to model the reasoning pro-cesses of traditional Chinese medical experts.Thesmall model of a data base for information retrievalcontains 830 herbal medicines selected out of theChinese herbal dictionary.Each of them can belookcd for with some conditions a ached.Althougha prototype of the advanced information retrievalsystem which we made could diagnose some modelcases,its performance seemed not enough to diagnosea practical one.Therefore,the system still needsa great deal of development.We also propose aplan to build a high performance system as good asa traditional Chinese medical expert.