Discusses theoretical considerations of indexing as a part of information retrieval theory. Topics discussed include mentalist proposals; text representation and knowledge representation; rules of grammar and syntax; linguistic theory; philosophical theories of Wittgenstein regarding rules; retrieval practices; and the formation of rules in…

Describes several aspects of the problem of supporting information retrieval system query requirements in the relational database management system (RDBMS) environment and proposes an extension to query processing called nonmaterialized relations. User interactions with information retrieval systems are discussed, and nonmaterialized relations are…

Discussion of Chinese information retrieval proposes a relaxed segmentation process which extracts the longest words and also the short words implied. Experiments show that information retrieval based on this segmentation gives a slightly higher effectiveness than n-grams or bigrams, and requires less time and space for document and query…

Considers the meanings of the terms document, documentation, information, information retrieval, and information science. Discusses the theoretical orientations of the discipline and how they are linked to epistemological assumptions, as well as the concept of memory institutions. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/LRW)

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…

Considers how the order of documents in information retrieval responses are determined and introduces a method that uses a probabilistic model of a document set where documents are regarded as states of a Markov chain and where transition probabilities are directly proportional to similarities between documents. (Author/LRW)

Compares two similarity measures for information retrieval in a document vector space, the distance-based and the angle-based, and presents a newly developed similarity measure based on both the distance and angle strengths of two compared objects. Introduces the concept of the iso-extent contour and then compares all three similarity measures.…

Discussion of information retrieval focuses on passage ranking to improve retrieval effectiveness. Discusses similarity measures; compares several types of passages; and introduces arbitrary passages, i.e. overlapping fragments of either fixed or variable length, that show ranking improvements over traditional document ranking schemes,…

Discusses vectors used in information retrieval and the algorithms used to manipulate them. Uses the Kohonen neural algorithm and a fuzzification model to perform a fuzzy clustering of document terms to reduce the high dimension and presents results from a test database. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of models that have been developed to structure text documents for information retrieval focuses on XML and its proposed query language XQL. Considers efficiency of the query engine and shows that an already existing model, Proximal Nodes, can be used as an efficient query engine behind an XQL front-end. (Author/LRW)

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.…

Discusses the need to index foreign words for information retrieval that are used in Korean text and presents an effective foreign word recognition and extraction method based on word segmentation. Uses both unknown word information acquired through the automatic dictionary compilation and foreign word recognition information. (Author/LRW)

From 1992 to 1995 the IFLA Study Group on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) developed an entity relationship model as a generalised view of the bibliographic universe, intended to be independent of any cataloguing code or implementation. The FRBR report itself includes a description of the conceptual model (the entities,…

Processing language requires the retrieval of concepts from memory in response to an ongoing stream of information. This retrieval is facilitated if one can infer the gist of a sentence, conversation, or document and use that gist to predict related concepts and disambiguate words. This article analyzes the abstract computational problem…

Meta-analysis is a technique used in a variety of disciplines to combine and summarize the findings of previous research. One step in the production of a meta-analysis is a thorough literature search for relevant studies. A variety of methods can be used to increase the number of studies that are found. This study examines the extent to which some…