Reports the results of experiments using colon classification for the analysis, representation, and retrieval of primary information from the full text of documents. Recall, precision, and search length measures indicate colon classification did not perform significantly better than Boolean or simple word occurrence systems. Thirteen references…

Isolates a number of criteria that should be met by any Boolean system generalized to have a weighting capability, and proves that the one weighting rule satisfying these conditions satisfies most of the other properties associated with Boolean algebra as well. Thirteen references are listed. (FM)

Replies to Stephen E. Robinson's article on the role of fuzzy set theory in information science (Journal of the American Society for Information Science; v29 n6 Nov 1978), particularly with regard to Robinson's discussions of uncertainty, min/max connectives, and relevance. (FM)

Responds to Barbara A. Cerny's reaction to Robinson's article on the role of fuzzy set theory in information science, addressing Cerny's points about probability theory and statistical uncertainty. (FM)

Proposes local similarity pattern (LSP) as a new method for computing digital image similarity. Topics include optimizing similarity computation based on genetic algorithm; relevance feedback; and an evaluation of LSP on five databases that showed an increase in retrieval precision over other methods for computing image similarity. (Author/LRW)

Proposes an effective term suggestion approach to interactive Web searches. Explains a log-based approach to relevant term extraction and term suggestion where relevant terms suggested for a user query are those that co-occur in similar query sessions from search engine logs rather than in the retrieved documents. (Author/LRW)

Compares standard global information retrieval searching with more localized techniques to address the database selection problem that users often have when searching for the most relevant database, based on experiences with the Westlaw Directory. Findings indicate that a browse plus search approach in a hierarchical environment produces the most…

This study examined the effect of order of presentation of document citations on users' relevance judgments. Results indicated that users are not influenced by order of presentation when fewer than 15 citations are presented. (four references) (MES)

Presents two partitioning methods for signature files and a method of fast weight computation to implement a document ranking strategy. Storage requirements, number of disk accesses, and processing time for these methods are compared with two other access methods. Merits of the partitioning methods are summarized. (20 references) (MES)

Describes a modular system called the TemplateFiller System that digests large volumes of text, filtering out irrelevant articles and distilling the remainder into templates that represent information from the articles in pairs. Other research in template filling is reviewed, and precision and recall using the TemplateFiller is evaluated.…

Discussion of information-retrieval test collections focuses on a study of TREC documents that used scaling and visualization of documents using a maximum-likelihood estimation method to examine the relevance of documents retrieved. Discusses clustering, similarity measures, isomorphism, and semantic relevance. (LRW)

Discusses relevance in distributed information retrieval and presents a method for solving the collection-fusion problem in hypermedia digital libraries. Describes links between hypermedia documents that reside in distributed hypermedia collections that can supply information to allow effective collection fusion, and considers results of…

Proposes a Korean information-retrieval system that can alleviate syntactic term mismatches by segmenting compound nouns as well as by normalizing noun phrases and which can provide appropriate similarity measurements. Discusses weighting phrasal terms and describes experimental results that considered recall and precision. (Author/LRW)

Proposes a novel approach to automatically retrieve keywords and then uses genetic algorithms to adapt the keyword weights. Discusses Chinese text retrieval, term frequency rating formulas, vector space models, bigrams, the PAT-tree structure for information retrieval, query vectors, and relevance feedback. (Author/LRW)

This study used semantic relations expressed in text, particularly cause-effect relations, to improve information retrieval effectiveness. Investigated whether information obtained by matching cause-effect relations expressed in documents with the cause-effect relations expressed in users' queries can be used to improve retrieval results, in…