Describes an automatic procedure which uses the syntactic relations as the basis for grouping words into classes. It forms classes by grouping together nouns that occur as subject (or object) of the same verbs, and similarly by grouping together verbs occurring with the same subject or object. (Author)

Describes a model for a front end query processor to deal with incomplete information in a database. The effectiveness of the processor in restricting the number of objects to be processed in a query and in aiding the interpretation of a query is discussed. (26 references) (Author/CLB)

Describes an algorithm for the calculation of term discrimination values that may be used when the interdocument similarity measure used is the cosine coefficient and when the document representations have been weighted using one particular term weighting scheme. (7 references) (Author/CLB)

Reports on a project showing that relational data models, including unnormalized models that allow the nesting of relations, cannot fully capture the structural properties of lexical information. A feature-based model that allows for a full representation of some nesting and defines a factoring mechanism is described and demonstrated. (38…

Looks for a method to formulate algorithms useful for the synthesis of Czech in machine translation where the point of departure for the synthesis can be more or less identical with the semantic representation. (Author/PF)

Presents a methodology for extending string indexing from index display production to the provision of descriptor phrases for term proximity searching. Objectives of the extension are discussed, and an illustration of the use of an existing string indexing system for this purpose is given. (14 references) (CLB)

A comparison was made between the language of a group of articles taken from the "Scientific American" and the language of articles given as references by them. Distribution and overlap of vocabulary in the two groups of articles were analyzed. Some differences between the writings in two areas of science were found. (Author)

Analyzes different kinds of reformulations used in information retrieval systems where full text databases are accessed through natural language queries. Tests of these reformulations on large full text databases managed by the Syntactic and Probabilistic Indexing and Retrieval of Information in Texts (SPIRIT) system are described, and an expert…

Describes SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization and Retrieval), a prototype intelligent information retrieval system that extracts useful information from large bodies of text. It overcomes limitations of linguistic coverage by applying a text processing strategy that is tolerant of unknown words and gaps in…

Explores the fundamentals of browsing behavior as a basis for the creation of an intelligent computer system to assist in online information retrieval. A prototype system is described, and the results of initial tests are reported. (5 references) (Author/CLB)

Presents a model for the a priori analysis of natural language queries which uses an algorithm to transform the query into a logical pattern that is used to determine the answerability of the query. The results of testing by a prototype system implemented in PROLOG are discussed. (20 references) (CLB)

Discussion of discourse modeling in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics focuses on a dialog model that incorporates the illocutionary aspects of information-seeking dialogs. The relevance of a theory developed for the analysis of written texts--Rhetorical Structure Theory--is explained, and future work is discussed. (25…

Describes the two basic approaches to the calculation of term discrimination values for automatic indexing. The results of an experiment that investigated the differences between algorithms of these two approaches in terms of their impact on the discrimination value model are reported and discussed. (13 references) (Author/CLB)

Describes experiments that compared a new method for automatically analyzing semantic structures in text by statistical means with the standard vector space model. Findings indicate that combining both methods improved performance over either alone. The effects of other experimental variables on retrieval performance (term weighting, suffix…