Discussion of information-retrieval effectiveness focuses on the use of multiple query or document representations, or multiple retrieval techniques, and combining the retrieval results (also known as data fusion). Experimental results with the SMART System (developed at Harvard and Cornell Universities for over 38 years) indicate combining…

Reports on the progress of the natural language information retrieval project, a joint effort led by GE (General Electric) Research, and its evaluation at the sixth TREC (Text Retrieval Conference). Discusses stream-based information retrieval, which uses alternative methods of document indexing; advanced linguistic streams; weighting; and query…

Proposes a method to improve retrieval performance of the vector space model by using users' relevance feedback. Discusses the use of singular value decomposition and the latent semantic indexing model, and reports the results of two experiments that show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the test collections developed in the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) workshops for information retrieval research and describes a study by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) that verified their reliability by investigating the effect changes in the relevance assessments have on the evaluation of retrieval results.…

Considers relevance and recall as measures of the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Highlights include relevance judgments and information retrieval, including experiments with test collections; information retrieval and assessment of recall; and a comparison of two retrieval mechanisms using a new set of relevance judgments designed…

Discusses some of the work included in the sixth TREC (Text Retrieval Conference). Highlights include retrieval effectiveness and relevance feedback; linguistic phrase identification; word elimination; weighting; precision and recall; query concepts; ad hoc and Chinese retrieval; and cross lingual information retrieval. (LRW)

Considers some of the most fundamental problems in music information retrieval, challenging the common assumption that searching on pitch alone is likely to be satisfactory for all purposes. Discusses special issues related to polyphonic music, user-interface issues, and the notion of relevance for music information retrieval. (Contains 52…

Proposes local similarity pattern (LSP) as a new method for computing digital image similarity. Topics include optimizing similarity computation based on genetic algorithm; relevance feedback; and an evaluation of LSP on five databases that showed an increase in retrieval precision over other methods for computing image similarity. (Author/LRW)

Discusses relevance in distributed information retrieval and presents a method for solving the collection-fusion problem in hypermedia digital libraries. Describes links between hypermedia documents that reside in distributed hypermedia collections that can supply information to allow effective collection fusion, and considers results of…

Proposes a Korean information-retrieval system that can alleviate syntactic term mismatches by segmenting compound nouns as well as by normalizing noun phrases and which can provide appropriate similarity measurements. Discusses weighting phrasal terms and describes experimental results that considered recall and precision. (Author/LRW)

Proposes a novel approach to automatically retrieve keywords and then uses genetic algorithms to adapt the keyword weights. Discusses Chinese text retrieval, term frequency rating formulas, vector space models, bigrams, the PAT-tree structure for information retrieval, query vectors, and relevance feedback. (Author/LRW)

This study used semantic relations expressed in text, particularly cause-effect relations, to improve information retrieval effectiveness. Investigated whether information obtained by matching cause-effect relations expressed in documents with the cause-effect relations expressed in users' queries can be used to improve retrieval results, in…

Provides an overview of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a workshop series designed to encourage research on text retrieval for realistic applications by providing large test collections and uniform scoring procedures. Highlights include routing tasks; Chinese language retrieval; cross-language information retrieval; filtering; high…

Discussion of query processing focuses on techniques developed by LEXIS-NEXIS for identifying key concepts, selecting synonyms and related terms, and detecting phrases that can be combined to increase recall and precision. Describes experiments in the ad hoc track of the sixth TREC (Text Retrieval Conference), including the use of ranking…

Describes Glean, a system which is based on the idea that coherent text contains significant latent information, such as syntactic structure and patterns of language use, which can be used to enhance the performance of information retrieval systems. Proposes an approach to increase the precision of information-retrieval using a supertagger.…