Reviews literature relating to Bradford's Law of Scatter, which groups journals and articles to identify number of periodicals relevant to particular subject, and notes the gap between theoretical and empirical studies, i.e., no relationship has been found between variables which characterize empirical situations and theoretical models. Thirteen…

Explores inter-record linkage relationships of a bibliographic hypertext system through the use of descriptor term co-occurrences. Using term distribution and term exhaustivity data for an existing system, three models of term co-occurrence are developed and tested against the observed data. (Author/LRW)

Proposes split model for index term distribution in document set that uses rank function for high frequency terms and size function for low frequency terms; the point of transition is determined either empirically or by rule. Distributions to describe index term exhaustivity and term co-occurrence are considered briefly. (36 references) (EJS)

Describes a study that was conducted to model the navigation patterns followed by users when retrieving information in hypertext systems. The development of two frequency distribution models is explained, the influence of search tasks on path patterns is discussed, and further research is described. (Contains 17 references.) (LRW)

Presents a single framework for conducting topic analysis that performs both topic identification and text segmentation. Key characteristics of the framework are: representing a topic by means of a cluster of words closely related to the topic; and employing a stochastic model, called a finite mixture model, to represent a word distribution within…

Presents a coordination level matching algorithm to be used in document retrieval systems that incorporate relevance feedback strategies. It is argued that this algorithm may eliminate the need for the frequent reevaluation of documents that is currently found in such systems, and conditions under which reranking is unnecessary are given.…

Describes probabilistic document retrieval systems as a sequential learning process, in which the system learns the parameters of probability distributions describing the frequencies of feature occurrences in relevant and nonrelevant documents. Several techniques for estimating the parameters of distributions are described and the results of tests…

Reports algorithm for calculation of term discrimination values that is sufficiently fast in operation to permit use of exact values. Evidence is presented to show that relationship between term discrimination and term frequency is crucially dependent upon type of inter-document similarity measure used for calculation of discrimination values. (13…