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

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)

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)

Describes the System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization, and Retrieval (SCISOR), which is designed to parse and understand short newspaper stories on corporate takeovers. Highlights include issues involved in developing memory organization and retrieval components, theoretical considerations involved in the system design, and a…

An information retrieval system which aspires to retrieval of relevant documents should have second stage which will order topical set to provide maximum informativeness to requestor. A two-stage system concerned only with topicality can be iterated to generate a high recall set and discard imprecise documents without user input. (EJS)

The traditional concern with relevance or nonrelevance of unexamined documents is misplaced, and traditional measures of effectiveness should be replaced by estimates of direct utility of examined documents. (Author)

Describes an information system interface that allows specification of uncertain queries and combines evidence about the relevance of documents to produce an overall ranking. Results of an experiment that addressed some of the cognitive aspects of such an interface are also reported. (22 references) (Author/MES)

Discusses expert systems and their value as components of information retrieval systems related to semantic inference, and describes IOTA, a model of an intelligent information retrieval system which emphasizes natural language query processing. Experimental results are discussed and current and future developments are highlighted. (Author/LRW)

Describes a model of an information retrieval system based on a thesaurus with weights. Appropriate terms are defined, and inclusiveness and two other fundamental properties of the system are presented. (CWM)

Discussion of document retrieval systems and measuring system performance focuses on the upper bounds, or maximum performance, that can be obtained with a system. Topics addressed include bounds for retrieval performance; average search length; average precision; incomplete searches; an asymmetric measure of retrieval performance; and measuring…

Addresses problem of developing machine-based information system capable of indicating one document, out of a set of documents written in natural language, which shows maximal degree of homeosemy (relationship in meaning between two texts language-fragments ) toward natural language query. Linguistic aspects, information traces, trigrams,…

Discusses the overlap of research in artificial intelligence and information retrieval, focusing on the papers included in this special issue of Information Processing and Management. Highlights include the emphasis on evaluation and testing in prior research and use of manual and automatic indexing, expert systems, knowledge representation, and…

Discussion of database design that allows wider range of capabilities than conventional information retrieval database covers prestructuring of searches to pinpoint target items, which are selected from browseable display, and navigation capability, which allows user to move from record to record within database to facilitate extraction of…

This paper is concerned with the organization and retrieval of records in document retrieval systems which admit of imprecision in the form of fuzziness in document characterization and retrieval rules. A mathematical model for such systems, based on the theory of fuzzy sets, is introduced. (Author)