Discusses how imprecision and uncertainty are dealt with in the UFO (Uncertainty and Fuzziness in an Object-oriented) database model. Such information is expressed by means of possibility distributions, and modeled by means of the proposed concept of "role objects." The role objects model uncertain, tentative information about objects,…

Traditional themes of information science must be expanded to accommodate systematic understandings of ways to design effective documentary systems and anticipate their social consequences. The field of social informatics offers important concepts, theories, and methods that give this kind of inquiry a sound scientific basis. Social informatics…

A statistical method of drawing index terms or "highlights" from text is presented that uses no stop list, stem or other language- and domain-specific components, allowing operation in any domain or language with minimal modification. Some experimental results are presented, showing operation in six different languages. (67 references)…

Discusses how to increase user satisfaction by designing information retrieval systems that inform the user while the user is interacting online. Models the information processing operations of a user who has received an information message from the system and is stimulated into grasping at a higher understanding of the information need. (Contains…

Presents a heuristic, attribute-based, noise-tolerant data mining program, HCV (Version 2.0) based on the newly-developed extension matrix approach. Outlines some techniques implemented in the HCV program for noise handling and discretization of continuous domains; an empirical comparison shows that rules generated by HCV are more compact than the…

Describes a system that was developed in Germany for natural language processing (NLP) to improve free text analysis for information retrieval. Techniques from empirical linguistics are discussed, system architecture is explained, and rules for dealing with conjunctions in dependency analysis for free text processing are proposed. (13 references)…

Investigates how to improve the performance of an Arabic Information Retrieval System (Arabic-IRS) by imposing the retrieval method, Mixed Stemming, over individual words of a query depending on the importance of the word, the stem or the root of the query terms in the database. This method computes term importance using a Term Frequency and…

For about 10 years, several proposals to deal with ill-known information in database management systems have been made, and extensions of the relational data model have been proposed. An overview of functional dependencies is provided, and the connection between fuzzy functional dependencies and database design is discussed. (AEF)

Protein Annotators' Assistant (PAA) is a software system which assists protein annotators in assigning functions to newly sequenced proteins. PAA employs a number of information retrieval techniques in a novel setting and is thus related to text categorization, where multiple categories may be suggested, except that in this case none of the…

Discusses information-seeking strategies in information retrieval systems, including Web search engines, and focuses on an in-depth investigation of shifts in the micro-level of user goals, namely interactive intention and information-seeking strategies. Discusses implications of the results for the design of adaptive information retrieval…

Integrates structured data and text using the unchanged, standard relational model. The performance of a parallel relational database system and the effect of query reduction on accuracy were tested, and it was found that queries can be reduced prior to their implementation without incurring significant loss in precision/recall. (AEF)

Discussion of the problem of control in documentary information retrieval (IR) systems focuses on feedback mechanisms. Information needs are discussed, particularly the Problem Oriented Information Need (POIN); the structure of an adaptive IR system is described; and the design of algorithms for automated IR systems is explained. (33 references)…

This article continues the description of DFT (Document, Find, Theseus), an online documentation system that provides computer-managed on-demand printing of software manuals as well as the interactive retrieval of reference passages. Document boundaries in the hypertext database are discussed, search vocabulary complexities are described, and text…

Uses a simple model of an information retrieval (IR) technology to examine performance measures for IR systems. Shows that, if a user is employing a system optimally, then reasonable performance measures will tend to be relatively robust, or insensitive, to small variations in assumptions about the user's behavior. (AEF)

Discusses the results of modeling the performance of searching large text databases via various parallel hardware architectures and search algorithms. The performance under load and the cost of each configuration are compared, and a common search workload used in the modeling is described. (Contains 26 references.) (LRW)