Provides an overview of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a workshop series designed to encourage research on text retrieval for realistic applications by providing large test collections and uniform scoring procedures. Highlights include routing tasks; Chinese language retrieval; cross-language information retrieval; filtering; high…

Discussion of query processing focuses on techniques developed by LEXIS-NEXIS for identifying key concepts, selecting synonyms and related terms, and detecting phrases that can be combined to increase recall and precision. Describes experiments in the ad hoc track of the sixth TREC (Text Retrieval Conference), including the use of ranking…

Describes Glean, a system which is based on the idea that coherent text contains significant latent information, such as syntactic structure and patterns of language use, which can be used to enhance the performance of information retrieval systems. Proposes an approach to increase the precision of information-retrieval using a supertagger.…

When remembering past choices, people tend to attribute positive features to chosen options and negative features to rejected options. The present experiments reveal the important role beliefs play in memory reconstruction of choices. In Experiment 1, participants who misremembered which option they chose favored their believed choice in their…

Argumentation is a process that occurs often in ill-defined domains and that helps deal with the ill-definedness. Typically a notion of "correctness" for an argument in an ill-defined domain is impossible to define or verify formally because the underlying concepts are open-textured and the quality of the argument may be subject to discussion or…

The purpose of this project was to investigate how students' search strategies changed over the course of a semester-long information literacy class. Data collection included four different paper questionnaires corresponding to course content in the spring 2008 semester. Seventy-seven participants completed the questionnaires and course work in…

It is easy to lament the shortcomings of traditional online public access catalogs (OPACs) in the Google Age. Users cannot, for example, usually input a snippet of a long-forgotten pop song's chorus into an online library catalog and almost instantly retrieve a relevant result along with hundreds of other options. On the other hand, should OPACs…

With relevance to current students, the author has observed that when commuting by public transport, there is a near complete use of audio-visual devices by the "plugged-in" under 30 age group. New technology, new generation, and new allocations of time to work and study are combining to diminish lecture attendances. Some colleagues refuse to make…

The increasing use of portable computers and mobile computing and telecommunication devices means a re-think of how we access and retrieve information. Like many workers in knowledge-rich professions, university academics in Australia are increasingly overloaded with information in the form of messages, notes, papers, publications, books and so…

A model is proposed to explain the retrieval characteristics of an information retrieval system. (Author)

Proposes a system of evaluating information retrieval systems. (PF)

Explores the properties of independent variables in information retrieval systems and defines a class of basic variables named M-factors. (Author/PF)

This report summarizes the work carried out on the automatic construction of keyword classifications and their use in information retrieval. It discusses the possible characteristics of such classifications, and potential ways of using them; and describes the various approaches to classification that were considered in terms of an overall frame of…

The main purpose of the experiment was to answer the question whether broad or narrow terms function most effectively in the retrieval of relevant documents. The answer depends on what the user of the retrieval system wants, his wants being expressed in terms of stated precision-recall preference, or by the exact number of relevant documents he…