Discussion of image database systems focuses on semantic queries and shows how an image is abstracted into a hierarchy of entity names and features; how relations are established between entities visible in the image; and how a "fuzzy" matching technique is used to compare semantic queries to image abstractions. (Author/LRW)

Elicitations study during 40 mediated information retrieval (IR) interactions identified 1557 search intermediary elicitations within 15 purpose categories (requests for information on search terms and strategies, database selection, search procedures, system's outputs and relevance of retrieved items, and users' knowledge and previous…

Presents a probabilistic technique to retrieve passages from texts having a large size or heterogeneous semantic content. Results of experiments comparing the probabilistic technique to one based on a text segmentation algorithm revealed that the passage size affects passage retrieval performance; text organization and query generality may have an…

Describes a study that compared a hypertext-based bibliographic retrieval system with a traditional Boolean-based system. Results, conducted with novice and experienced searchers, revealed that the Boolean system performed better for tasks with a large number of relevant items, and that searcher experience level did not play a significant role.…

Analyzes the properties of genetic sequences that cause the failure of classical algorithms used for data compression. A lossless algorithm, which compresses the information contained in DNA and RNA sequences by detecting regularities such as palindromes, is presented. This algorithm combines substitutional and statistical methods and appears to…

Explores the evaluation of image and multimedia information-retrieval systems, particularly the effectiveness of several shape measures for content-based retrieval of similar images. Shape feature measures, or vectors, are computed automatically and can either be used for retrieval or stored in the database for future queries. (57 references)…

Results from an analysis of 1,025,010 Excite queries from 2001 are compared to similar Excite datasets from 1997 to 1999. Overall, results indicate that multimedia Web searching is undergoing major changes as Web content and searching evolves. (AEF)

The effectiveness of using the age of references to control the exhaustivity of the reference representation in information retrieval was investigated through analysis of optimal cluster-based retrieval results. The results show that the foreground representation at its optimal level of exhaustivity is restricted to references with ages less than…