Discussion of the use of search output clustering as an alternative representation method to ranked output focuses on difficulties involved in representing clusters for Internet users' evaluation in a concise and easily interpretable form. Describes findings and user feedback from a user study that investigated the effectiveness of search output…

Discussion of commercial document/information retrieval models focuses on the fact that document retrieval, specifically access to intellectual content, is a complex process which is most strongly influenced by the size of the document collection, the type of search (exhaustive, existence or sample) and the determinacy of document representation.…

Discussion of networked information retrieval and the interoperability of heterogeneous information-retrieval systems shows how differences concerning search operators and database schemas can be handled by applying data-abstraction concepts in combination with uncertain inference. Highlights include data types, data independence, schema…

Presents a new model for combining multiple sources of evidence in database merging based on logistic regression, and occurring only when ranks are available as a key to be used to merge different ranked lists obtained by various retrieval schemes. Results indicate better retrieval effectiveness than other approaches. (LRW)

Discussion of the study of interactive information retrieval (IR) at the Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC) focuses on summaries of the Interactive Track at each conference. Describes evolution of the track, which has changed from comparing human-machine systems with fully automatic systems to comparing interactive systems that focus on the search…

Discusses the role of search engines in Web usability and analyzes and evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of various indexing and searching strategies on a new Web text collection. Highlights include preprocessing techniques that might improve retrieval effectiveness; and hyperlinks as useful sources of evidence in improving retrieval…

Discusses information retrieval systems and extracting appropriate keywords from documents and proposes an effective substring search method by extending a pattern matching machine for multi-keywords called delayed keyword extraction (DKE). Also proposes a construction algorithm of the retrieval structure for speeding up the substring search.…

Discussion of citation analysis on the Web considers Web hyperlinks as a source to analyze citations. Topics include basic graph theory applied to Web pages, including matrices, linear algebra, and Web topology; and hubs and authorities, including a search technique called HITS (Hyperlink Induced Topic Search). (Author/LRW)

Discussion of the vagueness of queries and uncertainty of knowledge when searching in information retrieval systems focuses on searching proper names and using similarity measures, including phonetic similarity, typing errors, and plain string similarity. It is shown experimentally that all three approaches lead to significantly higher retrieval…

Considers the consistency in selection of search concepts and search terms carried out by human intermediaries in online bibliographic retrieval. Degree of consistency is calculated on the basis of search terms and concepts both for one individual over time and by comparing the performance of several individuals on one request. (JKP)

Discussion of intelligent information retrieval focuses on the use of Constrained Spreading Activation (CSA) techniques to search on the World Wide Web. Highlights include associative and ostensive information retrieval; hypertext links; query formulation; a prototype system that used CSA to search the Web; and results of an evaluation. (LRW)

This paper studies the influence of question-related variables on Web users' choices of search strategy in the initial stage of a search. Discusses the results of a questionnaire and suggests implications for training Web users as well as future research on Web searching behavior. (Author/LRW)

Discusses latent semantic indexing (LSI); considers the high cost associated with the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the large term-by-document matrix that becomes a barrier for its application to scalable information retrieval; and shows that information filtering using level search techniques can reduce the SVD computation cost for LSI.…

Presents a fuzzy evaluation method of SGML documents based on computing with words. Topics include filtering the amount of information available on the Web to assist users in their search processes; document type definitions; linguistic modeling; user-system interaction; and use with XML and other markup languages. (Author/LRW)

Demonstrates how recall and precision can be expressed using a topological approach to retrieval introduced by S.C. Cater (1986); investigates threshold and close match retrieval systems and optimal and non-optimal searching; and highlights relations with hypergeometric and non-standard distributions. Includes seven appendices of mathematical…