Use of syntactic trace as an access strategy for large files containing arbitrary languages for which thesaurus-based and multiple attribute search techniques are unsuitable. (LS)

The binary search scheme is a method of finding a particular file from a set of ordered files stored in a computer. In this article an exact expression for the expected number of passes required to find a file is derived. (Author)

Using abstract models of thesaurus-based and multi-attribute retrieval systems a correspondence between the two systems is established so that equivalent transformation of problem statements expressed by notions developed for one system into problem statements expressed by notions pretaining to the other one may be effectively constructed. (5…

A probabilistic model for interactive retrieval is presented. Bayesian statistical decision theory principles are applied: use of prior and sample information about the relationship of document descriptions to query relevance; maximization of expected value of a utility function, to the problem of optimally restructuring search strategies in an…

The theoretical model of a document retrieval system is described by giving logical meaning to the vagueness and the similarity characteristic to such systems, with the frequency of occurrences of keywords and the relations among them taken into consideration. (6 references) (Author/SJ)

A review is given of doubly-chained trees for information retrieval. It is shown that the chaining steps may be of different cost depending upon whether the step is vertical or horizontal. The problem of constructing an optimal retrieval tree is formulated mathematically and a solution procedure given. (5 references) (Author/KE)

The search for an optimal decision strategy can be treated as a mathematical programming problem with linear objective function to be maximized over the convex set of certain functional space, provided one is willing to accept some ergodicity assumptions of the Markovian environment. (10 references) (Author)