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…

Discusses software design issues for Okapi, an information retrieval system that incorporates both search engine and user interface and supports weighted searching, relevance feedback, and query expansion. The basic search system, adjacency searching, and moving toward a distributed system are discussed. (Author/LRW)

Compares empirical results from three experiments using Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) data and search topics that involved three different user interfaces. Results show that marking Boolean queries on text, which encourages browsing, and hypertext interfaces to text retrieval systems can benefit recall and can also benefit novice users.…

Presents a tested hypothesis raised by an earlier study and confirmed that query-surrogate documents chosen from within dense interdocument structures in scaled and visualized TREC Topic document data sets increased the number of relevant documents retrieved by 26-46%. Performance of information retrieval systems on data sets for which relevant…

Describes the MultiText information retrieval system that finds arbitrary passages of text, as opposed to complete documents, that are likely to be relevant. Discusses relevance ranking, term expansion, interactive user interface, and distributed searching used in experiments for TREC-6 (Text Retrieval Conference) in the ad hoc, high precision,…

Reviews the development of research and evaluation in information retrieval. Highlights include the Cranfield projects concerning recall and precision, the Medlars experiment that focused on relevance, TREC (Text Retrieval Conference), evaluation versus understanding, interface versus functionality, document length, and terms and user interaction.…

Examines a selection of innovative search tools that attempt to solve specific problems in searching. Topics include search difficulties, including controlled vocabularies and keyword searching; retrieval issues, including relevancy ranking; document discrimination problems; creating search tools for specific audiences; and interface design,…

This study uses the human approach to examine the sources and effectiveness of search terms selected during 40 mediated interactive database searches and focuses on determining the retrieval effectiveness of search terms identified by users and intermediaries from retrieved items during term relevance feedback. (Author/JKP)

Proposes a method of evaluating information retrieval systems by concentrating on individual tools (commands, their menus or graphic interface equivalents, or a move/stratagem). A user would assess the relative success of a small part of a search, and every tool used in that part would be credited with a contribution to the result. Cumulative…

Presents a stratified model of information retrieval interaction that views interaction as a dialog between participants (user and computer) through an interface. Discusses traditional and interaction models, and extension to relevance, user modeling, search term selection, and types of feedback in information retrieval. (AEF)

This paper outlines work on a class of systems called Personal Information Management Assistants (PIMAs). PIMAs observe user interaction with everyday applications and use these observations to anticipate a user's information needs. They then automatically fulfill these needs by accessing Internet information sources, filtering the results, and…

E-Referencer is an expert intermediary system for searching library online public access catalogs (OPACs) on the World Wide Web. It is implemented as a proxy server that mediates the interaction between the user and Boolean OPACs. It transforms a Boolean OPAC into a retrieval system with many of the search capabilities of Web search engines.…

This study tested two Web personal spiders (i.e., agents that take users' requests and perform real-time customized searches) based on best first-search and genetic-algorithm techniques. Both results were comparable and complementary, although the genetic algorithm obtained higher recall value. The Java-based interface was found to be necessary…

Discussion of information retrieval in the humanities focuses on a study of 10 graduate students at Indiana University as they conducted literature searches using databases on CD-ROM. Highlights include a review of related literature, search strategies, relevance assessments, human-computer interaction, and databases and indexing. (LRW)

A survey of recent publications shows that frequent topics of Internet and information retrieval research are the effectiveness of search engines, information validation and quality, user studies, design of user interfaces, data structures and metadata, classification and vocabulary based aids, and indexing and search agents. The changing balance…