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)

The implications of some major linguistic and semiotic concepts for the machine manipulation of natural language text are examined. It is proposed that the study of meaning should contribute to the development of sophisticated algorithms for machine indexing. (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…

Examines the retrieval effectiveness of five hierarchical clustering methods (single link, complete link, group average, Ward's method, and weighted average) as a function of indexing exhaustivity with four test collections. Evaluations of retrieval effectiveness are based on three measures of optimal retrieval performance. (Author/LRW)

A probabilistic model of keyword indexing is outlined, and some of the consequences of the model are examined. An algorithm defining a measure of indexability is developed--a measure intended to reflect the relative significance of words in documents. (Author)

Describes exploratory experiments in evaluating and improving a thesaurus through studying its effect on retrieval. A formula was developed to measure the conceptual distance between queries and documents encoded as sets of thesaurus terms. Comparison to the performance of people judging conceptual distance shows that the formula accurately…

Discusses the feasibility of building intelligent rule- or weight-based algorithms into general-purpose software for interactive thesaurus navigation. Previous research is surveyed; practical investigations in thesaurus navigation and query enhancement are described; and implications for automatic or intelligent thesaurus navigation are…

Describes experiments in Arabic information retrieval using 29 queries against a base of 355 bibliographic records. Using roots and stems as index terms worked better than words, and the root performed as well as or better than the stem at low recall levels and definitely better at high recall levels. (Contains 30 references.) (KRN)