Describes research designed to improve automatic pre-coordinate term indexing by applying language analysis techniques to identify term sources in requests, and to generate variant expressions of concepts involved for document text searching. Text analysis, term extraction, variant generation, and retrieval trial are highlighted. Thirteen…

Explores the concept of information retrieval and summarizes the development of information retrieval systems. The role of relevance judgments as a systems test is discussed, principles of what information systems can and cannot be expected to achieve are presented, and areas of research interest are identified. (43 references) (CLB)

Provides background of automatic indexing and overview of Fully Automatic Syntactically based Indexing of Text (FASIT), a system based on idea that content-bearing words belong to certain syntactic categories. Results of comparison of FASIT with thesaurus and stem-based indexing systems on database of 250 documents and 22 queries are summarized.…

Briefly reviews various methodologies for constructing enhanced document representations, discusses their general lack of usefulness, and describes a method of document indexing which uses title words taken from bibliographically related items. Evaluation of this process indicates that it is not sufficiently reliable to warrant incorporation into…

Part One, Automatic Content Analysis contains: "Content Analysis in Information Retrieval;""The 'Generality' Effect and the Retrieval Evaluation for Large Collections;""Automatic Indexing Using Bibliographic Citations" and "Automatic Resolution of Ambiguities from Natural Language Text." Part Two, Automatic…

Four papers are included in Part One of the eighteenth report on Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Texts (SMART) project. The first paper: "Content Analysis in Information Retrieval" by S. F. Weiss presents the results of experiments aimed at determining the conditions under which content analysis improves retrieval results as well…

Describes technique for automatic book indexing requiring dictionary of terms with text strings that count as instances of term and text in form suitable for processing by text formatter. Results of experimental application to portion of book text are presented, including measures of precision and recall. Ten references are noted. (EJS)

Describes the use of FAMULUS, a database management system, to teach library science students at Case Western Reserve University indexing, computerized file construction, and online information retrieval. The special features of FAMULUS and their use in course instruction are outlined and evaluated. A 19-item reference list is attached. (Author/JL)

Describes a clustering algorithm designed for dynamic data bases and presents an update procedure which maintains an effective document classification without reclustering. The effectiveness of the algorithms is demonstrated for a subset of the Cranfield collection. (Author)

Compares the user features of an in-house online search system based on automatic indexing with those of commercial search services, considering specific user types, file structure and applications, and the basic operating system environment. (FM)

Briefly reviews early work in documentation and text processing, and predictions that were made about the creative role of computers in information retrieval. An attempt is made to explain why these predictions were not fulfilled and conclusions are drawn regarding the limits of computer power in text retrieval applications. (Author/CLB)

Describes XMARC, a set of computer programs which provides students with a simplified means of writing programs for the automatic indexing of an experimental collection of MARC records. (Author/FM)

Describes the implementation of a user-oriented online indexing system at the Boys Town Center's Library Services Division. (FM)

An on-line document retrieval system is described which combines a data base management system with automatic processing of natural language queries and abstracts. (Author)

The report is concerned with the implementation of an on-line information storage and retrieval system for the Rome Air Development Center. This system is to incorporate techniques of automatic document classification for a large document collection in an interactive environment. Following a review of the system design, the implementation of the…