Natural language processing (NLP) is concerned with getting computers to do useful things with natural language. Major applications include machine translation, text generation, information retrieval, and natural language interfaces. Reviews important developments since 1987 that have led to advances in NLP; current NLP applications; and problems…

Five computerized role-playing scenarios accepting unrestricted natural language input were administered to 72 freshman medical students. The scenarios measured and automatically scored responses on five psychological dimensions: social skills, level of frustration, submissiveness, combativeness, and negotiative ability. Tests identified…

Presents three different statistical techniques for identifying content-bearing phrases within a natural language database. Describes results on the effectiveness of the scoring methods when applied to MEDLINE phrases, and how the three methods can be combined to improve performance. Processing results for an example document are provided.…

Explores the interrelation between Web publishing and information retrieval technologies and lists new approaches to Web indexing and searching. Highlights include Web directories; search engines; portalisation; Internet service providers; browser providers; meta search engines; popularity based analysis; natural language searching; links-based…

Boolean systems still constitute most of the installed base of online public access catalogues (OPACs) in the French universities even if many studies have shown that Boolean operators are not frequently used by non-librarian users (by contrast with professional librarians). The first study examined the use of Boolean operators by French…

A variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing information about the natural use of natural languages is surveyed, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the properties of a research task that make a given technique more or less suitable to it rather than comparing techniques globally and ranking them absolutely. An initial goal is to…

Presents a new extraction pattern, modified Document Type Definition (mDTD), which relies on analytical interpretation to identify extraction target from the contents of Web documents. Experiments with 330 Korean and 220 English Web documents on audio and video shopping sites yielded an average extraction precision of 91.3% for Korean and 81.9%…

Compares two natural language processing search engines, WIN (WESTLAW Is Natural) and FREESTYLE, developed by LEXIS. Legal issues in natural language queries were presented to identical libraries in both systems. Results showed that the editorials enhanced relevance; a search would be more thorough using both databases; and if only one system were…

Proposes a two-step model of discovery in which new scientific hypotheses can be generated and subsequently tested. Applying advanced natural language processing techniques to find biomedical concepts in text, the model is implemented in a versatile interactive discovery support tool. This tool is used to successfully simulate Don R. Swanson's…

Reviews template mining research and shows how templates are used in World Wide Web search engines and metasearch engines for helping end-users generate natural language search expressions. Potential areas of application of template mining for extraction of information from digital documents are highlighted, and how such applications are used is…

The role that affective states play in learning was investigated from the perspective of a constructivist learning framework. We observed six different affect states (frustration, boredom, flow, confusion, eureka and neutral) that potentially occur during the process of learning introductory computer literacy with AutoTutor, an intelligent…

One source of potential difficulty for struggling readers is the variability of texts across grade levels. This article explores the use of automatic natural language processing techniques to identify dimensions of variation within a corpus of school-appropriate texts. Specifically, we asked: Are there identifiable dimensions of lexical and…

The potential of automatically generated indexes for information access has been recognized for several decades, but the quantity of text and the ambiguity of natural language processing have made progress at this task more difficult than was originally foreseen. Recently, a body of work on development of interactive systems to support phrase…

Discusses two query evaluation strategies used in large text retrieval systems: (1) term-at-a-time; and (2) document-at-a-time. Describes optimization techniques that can reduce query evaluation costs. Presents simulation results that compare the performance of these optimization techniques when applied to natural language query evaluation. (JMV)

Describes an information retrieval system in which advanced natural language processing is used to enhance the effectiveness of term-based document retrieval by preprocessing the documents; discovering interterm dependencies and build a conceptual hierarchy specific to database domain; and processing the user's natural language requests into…