A method and apparatus are provided for improving the precision of information retrieval systems that use logical form searching techniques. Under one embodiment of the invention, several logical form triples are produced from the user's query and are combined together by restrictive logical operators to generate a compound logical form query. A search is then performed to find documents that meet the requirements set by the compound logical form query. In other embodiments, results generated by a logical form search are intersected with results from a word search to form a more precise set of results.