There are six major studies of the effect of indexing depth on retrieval performance. They differ in purpose, methodology, measures, indexing language, field of study, and data base--nevertheless, all have found depth of indexing to have the same effect upon information retrieval. (13 references) (Author/NH)

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)

Investigates the feasibility of using a distance measure for automatic sequential document classification. This property of the distance measure is used to design a sequential classification algorithm which classifies key words and analyzes them separately in order to assign primary and secondary classes to a document. (VT)

Presents a new method to improve the performance of query processing in a spatial database. Experiments demonstrated that performance of database systems can be improved because both the number of objects accessed and number of objects requiring detailed inspection are much less than those in the previous approach. (AEF)

A series of five batches of twenty searches were carried out in a three year span of the INSPEC data base by the 31 Company's Information Retrieval Service. The same queries were processed manually in the corresponding volumes of Science Abstracts and comparison of the output of each search method exposed reasons for the failures. Emphasis is laid…

The relative retrieval efficiency of the title searching technique and the index term searching technique is so close that the choice of one method or the other must be primarily on economic grounds. (9 references) (Author)

In order to compare effects of input processing on information retrieval in three databases, 25 articles from a specific journal were examined. Tables and Venn diagrams show retrieval results from different manual and computer searches. The relation between document surrogates and subject matter of the documents is discussed. (SW)

An information retrieval system was developed using technical word occurrences as a basis for classification. A set of words, designated a vocabulary, was selected from the middle range of frequency listing of words occurring in an experimental sample of 94 documents. The selection produced 115 non-function words with technical definition that did…

The purpose of the study was to determine how many questions judged relevant to an article are also judged relevant using different length representations of the article, and how this proportion changes as the length of the representation changes. Several persons made relevance judgments for each of a set of articles to each of a set of questions.…

The establishment of a reference filing system, based on optical coincidence retrieval, for an eight-man research group studying gas reactions is described. The complete system is simple to use and gives rapid, precise reference retrieval. (1 reference) (Author)

Minimum, maximum, and average lengths and frequency counts for the data elements in the Chemical Substance and General Subject segments of the Standard Distribution Format (SDF) files distributed by Chemical Abstracts Service are presented. (5 references) (Authors)

QUEST is an interactive conversational Programming System (CPS) that was developed to serve as a conversational interface between a searcher of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) files and the North Carolina Science and Technology Research Center's Inverted File Search Program (STRC-IVS). This paper describes QUEST: its costs,…

Reports preliminary results of a study to develop and automate new metrics for assessment of information quality in text documents, particularly in news. Through focus group studies, quality judgment experiments, and textual feature extraction and analysis, nine quality aspects were generated and applied in human assessments. Experiments were…

Addresses the query- versus document-oriented dichotomy in information retrieval. Introduces a maximum likelihood approach to utilizing feedback data that can be used to construct a concrete object function that estimates both document and query parameters in accordance with all available feedback data. (AEF)