Four papers are included in Part One of the eighteenth report on Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Texts (SMART) project. The first paper: "Content Analysis in Information Retrieval" by S. F. Weiss presents the results of experiments aimed at determining the conditions under which content analysis improves retrieval results as well…

The four chapters included in this report are based on LINCS project activities undertaken since 1968, with an emphasis on indexing tools in the language sciences and related problems. Chapter one, "Indexing Tools for the Language Sciences: Methodology," discusses the development of a LINCS thesaurus and its role in the LINCS network.…

Uncovers issues in indexing that need scientific research, including the cognitive processes of indexers and users; vocabulary control; how best to supplement human indexers' intellectual effort with computer capabilities; structure and layout of indexes on the printed page and on the computer screen; and evaluation of indexes. (Contains 21…

Discusses index construction for text collections, reviews principal approaches to inverted indexes, analyzes their theoretical cost, and presents experimental results of the use of a single-pass inversion method on Web document collections. Shows that the single-pass approach is faster and does not require the complete vocabulary of the indexed…

Discusses methods for automatically compiling domain-oriented vocabularies in natural language systems and describes techniques for evaluating the quality of the resulting word lists. A study is described that used subject headings from Grolier's Encyclopedia and the United Press International newswire, and filters for removing high frequency…

Vocabulary studies conducted in this century are reviewed in this paper, with an emphasis on several recent investigations utilizing computer technology. The use of computers has greatly facilitated the ease and accuracy of word tabulation, but the lists are only as language-reflective as the sources from which they are derived. The great majority…

Discussion of human intellectual indexing versus automatic indexing focuses on automatic indexing. Topics include keyword indexing; negative vocabulary control; counting words; comparative counting and weighting; stemming; words versus phrases; clustering; latent semantic indexing; citation indexes; bibliographic coupling; co-citation; relevance…

The role of formal, controlled vocabularies for indexing and retrieval is contrasted with the use of natural language for these activities. The following credo is advanced for large central information processors as appropriate to the 1970's (1) Highly structured controlled vocabularies are obsolete for indexing and retrieval; (2) The natural…

Discusses the Vocabulary Switching System (VSS), an experimental, automated switching system, which specifically addresses the problems of heterogeneous database vocabularies and indexes and the difficulty these pose for users who wish to combine more than one database in a single online search. (CWM)

Designed to offer a "common language" to all of the parties involved in European cooperation in education, the European Education Metathesaurus is the set made up of the European Education Thesaurus (the third edition of the EUDISED Thesaurus) and the indexing languages that will be attached to it, whether sub-thesauri, specialized…

Describes the design of an automatic indexing system that is based on statistical techniques and expert system technology. Highlights include system architecture; the derivation of topic indicators, including word frequency; experimental results using documents from ERIC; the effects of stemming; and the identification of characteristic…

Describes an algorithm for computer generation of hierarchical indexes for document collections. The resulting index, when presented with a graphical interface, provides users with a view of a document collection that permits general browsing and informal search activities via an access method that requires no keyboard entry or prior knowledge of…

A practical machine translation system called CULT (Chinese University Language Translator), capable of translating Chinese mathematical texts into readable English, has been developed during the period 1969-1977 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Programs for the system are written in Standard FORTRAN and run on the ICL1904A computer system.…