Describes results of a study that investigated the effect of variations in indexing exhaustivity on retrieval performance in a vector space retrieval system. The test collection of documents in the National Library of Medicine's Medline file indexed under cystic fibrosis is described, and use of the SMART information retrieval system is discussed.…

Discussion of information-retrieval effectiveness focuses on the use of multiple query or document representations, or multiple retrieval techniques, and combining the retrieval results (also known as data fusion). Experimental results with the SMART System (developed at Harvard and Cornell Universities for over 38 years) indicate combining…

Describes SENTINEL, a prototype information-retrieval system that is a fusion of multiple information-retrieval technologies, integrating n-grams, a vector space model, and a neural network training rule. Discusses three-dimensional visualization capability, precision and recall, mathematical representation of a document, query building, and…

Presents an approach to a Genetic Information Retrieval Agent Filter (GIRAF) that filters and ranks documents retrieved from the Internet according to users' preferences by using a Genetic Algorithm and fuzzy set theory to handle the imprecision of users' preferences and users' evaluation of the retrieved documents. (Author/LRW)

Reports the results of a study of users' perceptions of relevance of documents that focused on evaluating the effectiveness of a telephone-based information retrieval service. Studies how users' perceptions varied depending on the form in which retrieved documents were presented, from full text to a machine-spoken summary. (Contains 27…

Presents a unified mathematical definition for the classical models of information retrieval and identifies a mathematical structure behind relevance feedback. Highlights include vector information retrieval; probabilistic information retrieval; and similarity information retrieval. (Contains 118 references.) (Author/LRW)

Reports on the progress of the natural language information retrieval project, a joint effort led by GE (General Electric) Research, and its evaluation at the sixth TREC (Text Retrieval Conference). Discusses stream-based information retrieval, which uses alternative methods of document indexing; advanced linguistic streams; weighting; and query…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

Student commons are no longer simply congregation spaces for students with time on their hands. They are integral to providing a welcoming environment and effective learning space for students. Many student commons have been transformed into spaces for socialization, an environment for alternative teaching methods, a forum for large group meetings…

This article presents a consideration of how students' existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools. It addresses one aspect of the ongoing pedagogical struggle with new…

Search engine use is one of the most popular online activities. According to a recent OCLC report, nearly all students start their electronic research using a search engine instead of the library Web site. Instead of viewing search engines as competition, however, librarians at Binghamton University Libraries decided to employ search engine…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of human information behaviour and to explore the relationship between information behaviour of users and the existing approaches dominating design and evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems and also to describe briefly new design and evaluation methods in which extensive…

As the Web is becoming a powerful new medium in scientific publication and scholarly communication, citation indexing has found a new application in the digital environment. The authors reviewed the new developments in Web-based citation indexing and conducted a case study in three major citation search tools, "Web of Science", "Scopus" and…

Adults can represent approximate numbers of items independently of language. This approximate number system can discriminate and compare entities as varied as dots, sounds, or actions. But can multiple different types of entities be enumerated in parallel and stored as independent numerosities? Subjects who were prevented from verbally counting…

As a branch of knowledge, Statistics is ubiquitous and its applications can be found in (almost) every field of human endeavour. In this article, the authors track down the possible source of the link between the "Siren song" and applications of Statistics. Answers to their previous five questions and five new questions on Statistics are presented.