Describes a relevance decision model based on a threshold concept and techniques to validate the model which were developed through pretesting. (Author/PF)

Term relevance weighting systems in interactive information retrieval are reviewed. An experiment in which information retrieval users ranked query terms in decreasing order of presumed importance prior to actual search and retrieval is described. (Author/KP)

The model assumes that the relevance assigned to a document by a juror is a random variable. (PF)

Describes results of a study that investigated the effect of variations in indexing exhaustivity on retrieval performance in a vector space retrieval system. The test collection of documents in the National Library of Medicine's Medline file indexed under cystic fibrosis is described, and use of the SMART information retrieval system is discussed.…

Reports on an evaluation of the construction of selective dissemination of information profiles for the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) in South Africa. (PF)

A procedure for adjusting queries to retrieve more documents for a user by automatically selecting and broadening the descriptors from relevant documents is described. Although more computing is required, recall and precision are superior to traditional searching. (KP)

A comparative evaluation of results in terms of recall and precision from queries submitted to systems with automatic and manual subject indexing. Differences were attributed to query formulation. The effectiveness of automatic indexing was found equivalent to manual indexing. (Author/KP)

The parameters of effectiveness evaluation of information systems put forward in this paper take account of the fact that both evaluation of the relevance and evaluation of the pertinence of documents are of a continuous character. (Author)

Presents two partitioning methods for signature files and a method of fast weight computation to implement a document ranking strategy. Storage requirements, number of disk accesses, and processing time for these methods are compared with two other access methods. Merits of the partitioning methods are summarized. (20 references) (MES)

Describes a computerized information retrieval system that uses three agglomerative hierarchic clustering algorithms--single link, complete link, and group average link--and explains their implementations. It is noted that these implementations have been used to cluster a collection of 12,000 documents. (LRW)

Introduces two distribution schemes that partition documents over multiple processors and the corresponding multiprocessor retrieval algorithms that match relevant documents to user queries. The suggested framework is based on a general purpose hypercube multicomputer architecture with a dedicated disk for each node. A timing analysis for the…

The single-link cluster method is used to construct a hierarchic classification for the 1400 documents in the Cranfield test collection. A variety of retrieval strategies applied to this hierarchy are evaluated in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. (Author)

Reports of two experimental studies of uses of citing statements to augment full-text information retrieval of biomedical papers indicate that 78 percent of the words in computer-recognized citing statements were correctly attributable to corresponding cited papers, and computer procedures missed four percent of the words in the actual statements.…

Presents a method for using the amount of semantic information in search-query terms as a weighting factor in constructing a fuzzy relation of resemblance between retrieved items in information retrieval online. Two tables, two figures, and a reference list accompany the text. (Author/JL)

Analyzes recent developments in the problem of processing queries expressed as Boolean expressions, shows that the concept of threshold values resolves the problems inherent with relevance weights, and explores possible evaluation mechanisms for document retrieval based on fuzzy set theory. Sixteen references are listed. (FM)