DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL DEVICE AND COMPUTER-READABLE RECORDING MEDIUM WHERE PROGRAM MAKING COMPUTER FUNCTION AS SAME DEVICE IS RECORDED

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To retrieve necessary information in real time during the editing of a document by retrieving a corresponding subdocument from a storage means according to the vector representation of an inputted retrieval condition. SOLUTION: This device is equipped with clients 100 which output retrieval conditions for retrieving desired descriptions in a document and a retrieval engine which can perform vector space retrieval and Boolean retrieval by generating a dislocation file 102 from a document data base(DB) 101 and further equipped with a retrieval server 103 which inputs the retrieval conditions from the clients 100 and retrieves the corresponding documents by using the dislocation file 102 according to the retrieval condition. Then an arbitrary range of the document displayed on a screen is specified and the structure of the character string within the range is analyzed; and a retrieval condition is generated by using the character string within the specified range and converted into vector representation. Further, the retrieval server 103 retrieves a subdocument according to the vector representation of the inputted retrieval condition.