A comparison was made of the performance in an automatic information retrieval environment of user queries and document abstracts available in natural language form in both English and French. The results obtained indicate that the automatic indexing and retrieval techniques actually used appear equally effective in handling the query and document…

The development of automatic indexing, abstracting, and extracting systems is investigated. Part I describes the development of tools for making syntactic and semantic distinctions of potential use in automatic indexing and extracting. One of these tools is a program for syntactic analysis (i.e., parsing) of English, the other is a dictionary of…

SOLAR is an interactive Storage and On-Line Automatic Retrieval system which is operational at Washington State University. It can run continuously with virtually any mix of tasks in a general purpose computing environment. (22 references) (Author)

This research project was motivated by results of earlier work (Katzer et al., 1982) on the overlap among document representations. In the earlier study, one representation used in the INSPEC database proved to perform unexpectedly well in comparison with other commonly used representations, such as controlled vocabulary or free-text terms from…

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.…

Analyzes associations among different role operators quantitatively by taking input strings from 200 abstracts, each related to subject fields of taxation, genetic psychology, and Shakespearean drama, and subjecting them to the Chi-square test. Significant associations by other differencing operators and connectives are discussed. A schema of role…

This is the fourth in a series of eight reports of a research study for the National Agricultural Library (NAL) on the effective utilization of bibliographic data bases in machine-readable form. It describes the general functional and software requirements of an NAL system using external sources of bibliographic data. Various system design…

The nature of typical mechanized data bases with which university information centers and libraries will be working is examined to provide background information for data base retrieval efforts. Format and content of the data must be taken into consideration before meaningful retrieval can be achieved. Hence both of these aspects are treated in…

Objectives of this project were to develop and test a method for automatically processing the text of abstracts for a document retrieval system. The test corpus consisted of 768 abstracts from the metallurgical section of Chemical Abstracts (CA). The system, based on a subject indexing rational, had two components: (1) a stored dictionary of words…

The development of a large scale selective dissemination of information program, its experimental operation, and program evaluation is reported. An IBM 7090/94 computer program compared user interest profiles with the subject indexes of reports announced in "Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports." Users were provided with selected…

Explores the use of discourse anaphora in scientific abstracts and presents rules to be used for distinguishing anaphoric functioning of terms. The results of tests using these rules are reported, and the implications for natural language understanding, question answering, automatic extracting, query analysis, and bibliographic retrieval are…