Outlines a cognitive process model of abstracting, indexing, and classification that is based on text comprehension processes. Text comprehension for indexing versus other purposes is discussed, including conceptual and perceptual processing; conceptual knowledge and the development of expertise are discussed; and characteristics of short-term and…

Surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with pictorial information retrieval. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, this paper focuses on indexing pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the…

Reports on a theoretical model of structured document indexing and retrieval based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence. Highlights include passage retrieval, hypertext, relevance, information needs, implementation of the model, an evaluation scheme designed to test the model's effectiveness, and results of experiments that investigated…

Reports on two experiments investigating the relationship between topical subject expertise and the assessment of relevance. Results indicate that topical subject expertise enhances effects of the semantic distance model (SDM), and that relevance assessment is a contingent, psychological phenomenon that is part of the human-perception task of…

Reviews different structures and techniques of knowledge representation: structure of database records and files, data structures in computer programming, syntatic and semantic structure of natural language, knowledge representation in artificial intelligence, and models of human memory. A prototype expert system that makes use of some of these…

Explores creating a thesaurus from a cognitive viewpoint, based on a system that organizes its knowledge representation/classification according to the authors' and users' images of the subject domain, in order to increase user-text interaction. Discusses the general framework, methods for implementing author-text structures, and an approach…