Discusses methods for automatically compiling domain-oriented vocabularies in natural language systems and describes techniques for evaluating the quality of the resulting word lists. A study is described that used subject headings from Grolier's Encyclopedia and the United Press International newswire, and filters for removing high frequency…

Describes the SAPHIRE (Semantic and Probabilistic Heuristic Information Retrieval Environment) that was developed to identify optimal approaches to indexing, retrieval, and evaluation of information retrieval systems in the biomedical domain. Six evaluation studies that have been done with SAPHIRE are summarized and future challenges are…

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) system was used to identify 1,734 documents on program evaluation methodology. Attempts to further characterize these documents by subject were only partially successful because of the lack of sufficient depth of indexing and design constraints of the computer system. Attempts to characterize…

The current state of information retrieval (IR) evaluation is reviewed with criticisms directed at the available test collections and the research and evaluation methodologies used, including precision and recall rates for online searches and laboratory tests not including real users. Automatic text retrieval systems are also discussed. (32…

The Insurance Division of the Special Libraries Association began an index to insurance magazines, the "Insurance Periodicals Index" (IPI), in 1962. This study examines its historical development. The index was published monthly in an insurance trade journal and then cumulated into an annual edition. Part of the background for its…

Describes a task-oriented assessment of two MEDLINE searching systems by medical students, one using Boolean searching on human-indexed thesaurus terms and one using natural language searching on words in the title, abstract, and indexing terms. Highlights include user certainty in answering questions, time needed, and user satisfaction.…

Presents abstracts of 36 special interest group (SIG) sessions. Highlights include the Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment; organizing and retrieving images; intelligent information retrieval using natural language processing; interdisciplinarity; libraries as publishers; indexing hypermedia; cognitive aspects of classification; computer-aided…

The growth in the size of the Internet has resulted in much effort being spent on indexing its contents. The most popular solutions are created by automatic methods, and although offering impressive coverage, they are disappointing where precision of meaning is required. Alternative services created by human beings arrange and index resources…