Describes the mechanistic model of language on which automatic indexing is based, and examines the underlying assumptions of the model to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of this indexing. It is argued that theoretical research from the fields of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy need to be incorporated into automatic indexing to overcome…

Compares artificial intelligence and information retrieval paradigms for natural language understanding, reviews progress to date, and outlines the applicability of artificial intelligence to question answering systems. A list of principal artificial intelligence software for database front end systems is appended. (CLB)