Suggests the designation of overlapping hierarchies in thesauri, first outlined in 1973, as a key element in progress towards a successful man-machine partnership. Article updates, expands, and provides theoretical background of 1973 proposal; postulates use of the UDC; and suggests means of distinguishing overlapping terms from other…

Describes MANIS, an information system for retrieval of interdisciplinary information in management, which maintains traditional classification but allows the user to combine terms of his choice, where choice is restricted to terms belonging to the systems of traditional classification. (CWM)

Describes a new text analysis approach to automate the indexing process, i.e., an automated keywording system designed to behave as a human expert indexer, and explains the rule base of the approach, which consists of lists of insertion and deletion rules generated by subject matter experts. (32 references) (Author/SD)

Examines current activities in subject analysis of large bibliographic databases to assist database managers in making cost-effective decisions. Issues addressed include manual indexing aids, automatic indexing, and connecting indexing terms. Several software packages are described, and future research directions are suggested. (58 references)…

This analysis of Zipf's law uses an index for the sequence of observed values of the variables in a Zipf-type relationship. Three important properties relating rank, count, and frequency are identified, shapes of Zipf-type curves are described, and parameters of the Mandelbrot-Zipf law are discussed. (Author/LRW)

Studied the relationship between the vocabulary of user queries and the vocabulary of documents relevant to the queries, as well as the value of adding to the document description record in a retrieval system keywords from previous queries for which the document had proved useful. Eight references are listed. (FM)

Describes a computer-assisted system for the production of printed indexes based on networks of concept relations expressed in natural-language-like form. The LIPHIS is designed to handle more complex networks of concept relations, and so produce better indexing of highly detailed subjects. (Author/CWM)

Describes results of a study that investigated the effect of variations in indexing exhaustivity on retrieval performance in a vector space retrieval system. The test collection of documents in the National Library of Medicine's Medline file indexed under cystic fibrosis is described, and use of the SMART information retrieval system is discussed.…

Investigates the presence of clustering structure in a document collection and the influence of the presence of clustering structure on the success of cluster-based retrieval. Term-weight and similarity thresholds are discussed, empirical and statistical significance are considered, and indexing exhaustivity for document representation is…

Describes an algorithm for the calculation of term discrimination values that may be used when the interdocument similarity measure used is the cosine coefficient and when the document representations have been weighted using one particular term weighting scheme. (7 references) (Author/CLB)

Reports a study that examined 10 collections of mainly scientific subject areas indexed using Farradane's system of relational indexing. It compared (1) the use of relations, (2) the use of concept types, (3) the cross sections (or shape) of abstracts, and (4) the properties of "nodes." Statistical tables and graphs are included.…

Presents a methodology for extending string indexing from index display production to the provision of descriptor phrases for term proximity searching. Objectives of the extension are discussed, and an illustration of the use of an existing string indexing system for this purpose is given. (14 references) (CLB)

Describes technique developed as automatic support to subject heading indexing at BIOSIS based on use of formalized language for semantic representation of biological texts and subject headings. Language structures, experimental results, and analysis of journal/subject heading and author/subject heading correlation data are discussed. References…

Demonstrates the property of inclusiveness of document retrieval systems where documents are indexed by unweighted terms and in which query search patterns are Boolean functions of descriptors and presents three methods for determining a partial ordering on a set of system responses to these queries. Eleven sources are listed. (FM)

Describes an automatic method, based upon a text structure analysis and using a relatively small dictionary, to extract significant phrases from the title and the abstract of scientific and technical documents. The information representation of the document is discussed with relation to the construction of the document information retrieval…