Farradane's relational indexing appeared applicable to the scientific area of the properties of metals and gave good results with a greater depth of indexing. (Author/PF)

A test was carried out to investigate the assumption that there is a significant level of redundancy between documents. The conclusions were that notional overlap exists, but there appear to be very few cases of extreme redundancy, and at the document level, there is little possibility of practical application. (Author)

An investigation was made into the relative performance of the four major Chemical Abstracts Service magnetic tape data-bases. The overall retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against data-bases containing titles only, titles-plus-keywords, and titles-plus-digests, was calculated and these results are presented. (5 references) (Author/NH)

Reports the results of experiments using colon classification for the analysis, representation, and retrieval of primary information from the full text of documents. Recall, precision, and search length measures indicate colon classification did not perform significantly better than Boolean or simple word occurrence systems. Thirteen references…

Substantial alterations to a system often have little or no effect on particular collections. This may be due to poor separation of relevant and non-relevant documents. The paper presents a procedure for characterizing this separation, which can show whether proposed modifications of the base system are likely to be useful. (8 references)…

An n-gram is a string of characters, usually adjacent, extracted from a section of continuous text that can be used in spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval, dictionary search, text compression, and language identification applications. This article provides an introduction to the use of n-grams in textual…

Surveys the literature of the field. Includes a 152-item bibliography. (PF)

Indexing is the preprocessing of information to enable its retrieval, ranging from classification-based (precoordinate) to keyword searching (postcoordinate) approaches. This article describes a framework for modelling information retrieval systems in terms of sets of objects, relationships, and functions and discusses the application of indexing…

Describes a study funded by the Commission of the European Community that applied document retrieval algorithms to the "Excerpta Medica" database using the EMTREE thesaurus. Nonhierarchical relations were added to enrich the thesaurus, and document ranking is discussed in terms of the conceptual distance between the documents and the…

Reviews the current status of satellite remote sensing data, including problems with efficient storage and rapid retrieval of the data, and appropriate computer graphics to process images. Areas of research concerned with overcoming these problems are described. (16 references) (CLB)

Describes the organization of the House of Commons Library which provides information, documentation, and research services to its members and outlines the history of the Parliamentary On-Line Information System (POLIS). The physical description of POLIS, indexing practices, users, and the Library's subject thesaurus are discussed. Eight…

A semantic analysis of the "Weekly Subject Index Stop Word List" of "Current Contents" of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the full-stop word and semi-stop word lists of the Permuterm Subject Index of "Science Citation Index" was conducted. Emphasizes the necessity of an improved, semantically-oriented policy in preparing lists…

Describes PLEXUS, an expert system for information retrieval related to gardening, designed at the University of London for use in public libraries. Focusing on the semantic problems encountered, methods used in artificial intelligence and information science to resolve them are discussed, including classification and facet analysis. (Author/LRW)