A study was undertaken to classify mechanically a document collection using the free-language words in titles and abstracts of physics research papers. Using a clustering algorithm, results were obtained which closely duplicated clusters obtained by previous experiments with citations. A brief comparison is made with a traditional manual…

Introduces a conceptual integration approach to heterogeneous databases or information systems that exploits the similarity in metalevel information and performs metadata mining on database objects to discover a set of concepts that serve as a domain abstraction and provide a conceptual layer above existing legacy systems. Presents results of…

An algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of sequential indexing which does not use any grammatical or semantic analysis, but follows the principle of emulating human judgement by evaluation of machine-recognizable attributes of structured word assemblies. (Author)

Discussion of the failure of individual keywords to identify conceptual content of documents in retrieval systems highlights Metric Similarity Modeling, a method for creating vector space representation of documents based on modeling target interdocument similarity values. Semantic relatedness, latent semantic indexing, an indexing and retrieval…

Describes SWEAR (Systematic Weighting and Ranking), a powers-of-two algorithm that can be used for searching the World Wide Web or any large database that automatically creates discrete, well-defined result sets and displays them in decreasing order of likely relevance. Also discusses fuzzy sets. (Author/LRW)

Discusses structural components of databases that require data-mining algorithms and describes the SUBDUE system that is designed to discover knowledge in structural databases. Analyses the ability of SUBDUE to scale to large databases and describes parallel and distributed implementations to investigate methods for improving the scalability of…

The Hepatitis Knowledge Base (text of prototype information system) was used for modifying and testing "A Navigator of Natural Language Organized (Textual) Data" (ANNOD), a retrieval system which combines probabilistic, linguistic, and empirical means to rank individual paragraphs of full text for similarity to natural language queries…

Database Tomography (DT) is a textual database-analysis system consisting of algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and proximities from a large textual database, to augment interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. Describes use of the DT process, supplemented by literature bibliometric analyses, to derive technical…

Presents an algorithmic approach to addressing the vocabulary problem in scientific information retrieval and information sharing, using the molecular biology domain as an example. A cognitive study and a follow-up document retrieval study were conducted using first a conjoined fly-worm thesaurus and then an actual worm database and the conjoined…

Describes the unique reliability problems of very large databases that necessitate specialized techniques for hardware problem management. The discussion covers the use of controlled partial redundancy to improve reliability, issues in operating systems and database management systems design, and the impact of disk technology on very large…

Presents an algorithm for use in natural language document retrieval systems which automatically determines if the conjunction "and" in a statement representing an information need should be translated into a Boolean "and" or "or." The results of an experiment that used the algorithm are reported, and further research is suggested. (CLB)