Presents an interpolation theorem for an extended Boolean information retrieval model. Results show that whenever two or more documents are similarly ranked at any two points for a query containing exactly two terms, then they are similarly ranked at all points in between; and that results can fail for queries with more than two terms. (Author/LRW)

Investigates the problem of fusing collections of documents provided by multiple information retrieval systems. A parameterized approach is suggested in which a parameter determines how the documents in the individual collections are interleaved to form a fused list of documents. (Author/LRW)

Explains vocabulary mining in information retrieval and describes a framework for vocabulary mining that allows the use of rough set-based approximations even when documents and queries are described using weighted, or fuzzy, representations. Examines coordination between multiple vocabulary views and applies the framework to the Unified Medical…

Presents a general method to construct ordered similarity measures in information retrieval based on classical similarity measures for ordinary sets. Describes a test of some of these measures in an information retrieval system that extracted ranked document sets and discuses the practical usability of the ordered similarity measures. (Author/LRW)

Describes a string-searching algorithm for multiple patterns in a text string; explains the construction of a pattern-matching machine; presents a theoretical analysis and empirical evidence that supports the sublinearity of the algorithm; and compares this algorithm with the Boyer-Moore algorithm for a single pattern. (Contains 10 references.)…

Discusses latent semantic indexing (LSI) that would allow search engines to reduce the dimension of the document space by mapping it into a space spanned by conceptual indices. Topics include vector space models; singular value decomposition (SVD); unitary operators; the Haar transform; and new algorithms. (Author/LRW)

Explores aspects of data fusion (DF) for information retrieval (IR) using a set of data from the Fifth International Conference on Text Retrieval (TREC5). Derives an equation for effective DF based on a geometric model and shows that the performance of a pair of IR schemes may be approximated by a quadratic polynomial. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of information retrieval focuses on an Interaction Information Retrieval model in which documents are interconnected; queries and documents are treated in the same way; and retrieval is the result of the interconnection between query and documents. A theoretical mathematical formulation of this type of retrieval is given. (Contains 31…

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 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)

Presents a new model for combining multiple sources of evidence in database merging based on logistic regression, and occurring only when ranks are available as a key to be used to merge different ranked lists obtained by various retrieval schemes. Results indicate better retrieval effectiveness than other approaches. (LRW)

Describes an information retrieval, visualization, and manipulation model which offers the user multiple ways to exploit the retrieval set, based on weighted query terms, via an interactive interface. Outlines the mathematical model and describes an information retrieval application built on the model to search structured and full-text files.…

Discussion of models for information retrieval focuses on an application of linear algebra to text clustering, namely, a metric for measuring cluster quality based on the theory that cluster quality is proportional to the number of terms that are disjoint across the clusters. Explains term-document matrices and clustering algorithms. (Author/LRW)

Presents an indexing and information retrieval method that, based on the vector space model, incorporates term dependencies and thus obtains semantically richer representations of documents. Highlights include term context vectors; techniques for estimating the dependencies among terms; term weights; experimental results on four text collections;…