In this digital age, there is an abundance of online educational materials in public and proprietary platforms. To allow effective retrieval of educational resources, it is a necessity to build keyword-based search engines over these collections. In modern Web search engines, high-quality rankings are obtained by applying machine learning…

Purpose: This study analysed text mining from full-text articles and abstracts by postgraduate students in selected Nigeria universities. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a survey research design using a questionnaire as the instrument for data collection from 357 postgraduate students drawn using Raosoft sample size calculator. Six…

Boolean logic can be a difficult concept for first-year, introductory students to grasp. This paper compares the results of Boolean and natural language searching across several databases with searches created from student research questions. Performance differences between databases varied. Overall, natural search language is at least as good as…

Web analytics measure, collect, analyze, and report Internet data that help website managers improve the effectiveness of the site and its marketing efforts by allowing them to better understand how users interact with the site. Applying this data can help drive the right people to the website and keep them there. According to Joshua Dodson, Web…

Defines natural language processing (NLP); describes the use of NLP in information retrieval (IR); provides seven levels of linguistic analysis: phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic. Discusses the commercial use of NLP in IR with the example of DR-LINK (Document Retrieval using LINguistic Knowledge)…

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Boolean systems still constitute most of the installed base of online public access catalogues (OPACs) in the French universities even if many studies have shown that Boolean operators are not frequently used by non-librarian users (by contrast with professional librarians). The first study examined the use of Boolean operators by French…

Compares two natural language processing search engines, WIN (WESTLAW Is Natural) and FREESTYLE, developed by LEXIS. Legal issues in natural language queries were presented to identical libraries in both systems. Results showed that the editorials enhanced relevance; a search would be more thorough using both databases; and if only one system were…

Discusses the conversion project of the congressional papers of Senator John Heinz into digital format and the provision of electronic access to these papers by Carnegie Mellon University. Topics include collection background, project team structure, document processing, scanning, use of optical character recognition software, verification…