Topic models are mathematical and statistical models used to analyze textual data. The objective of topic models is to gain information about the latent semantic space of a set of related textual data. The semantic space of a set of textual data contains the relationship between documents and words and how they are used. Topic models are becoming…

Described is a Fortran computer program for an alternative algorithm for Thurstone's pair comparisons method. This algorithm provides an improved capacity for handling indeterminate proportions of one and zero as well as untruncated estimates of population scale values. (Author/JKS)

Discussion of electronic news available on the World Wide Web focuses on a methodology of associating news documents using similarity measures and a name-phrase algorithm to create news representations that can be compared and ranked to find related news items. Considers precision over recall and interactivity with the users. (Author/LRW)

Describes a new effectiveness measure as an alternative to the traditional evaluation measures of recall and precision in information retrieval systems. The statistical approach--which compares two retrieval algorithms--is explained, the information needs of the user are considered, and an experiment with a test collection of abstracts is…

Reviews 10 computerized business simulations used to teach business policy courses, discusses problems with measuring performance, and presents a statistically based approach to assessing performance that permits individual team goal setting as part of the computer model, and allows simulated firms to start with different financial and operating…