A manual search of Journal Citation Reports provides information which would be particularly useful for librarians interested in forming special collections and difficult to obtain by other methods. (Author/MBR)

The method described permits visual analysis of information retrieval (IR) experiment results in classic control and treatment group protocols. It is an additional analysis technique for the evaluation of IR procedures that may be conducted within the rich terrain of human visual acuity, supported by two well-known statistical measures. (Contains…

Describes FOCES (Foster Care Expert System), a prototype expert system for choosing foster care placements for children which integrates information retrieval techniques with artificial intelligence. The use of prototypes and queries in Prolog routines, extended Boolean matching, and vector correlation are explained, as well as evaluation by…

Rough set theory is a new mathematical tool to deal with vagueness and uncertainty. Computational methods are presented for using rough sets to identify classes in datasets, finding dependencies in relations, and discovering rules which are hidden in databases. The methods are illustrated with a running example from a database of car test results.…

Briefly describes the principal relevance feedback methods that have been introduced over the years and evaluates the effectiveness of the methods in producing improved query formulations. Prescriptions are given for conducting text retrieval operations iteratively using relevance feedback. (24 references) (Author/CLB)

Describes ACTS, an Automated Chinese Text Segmentation prototype for Chinese full text retrieval that applies partial syntactic analysis, (i.e., the analysis of morphemes, words, and phrases) but not complete sentences. Topics include Chinese morphosyntactic categories; word grammar; segmentation; category disambiguation; parsing; and possible…

Discusses the use of optical character recognition (OCR) for inputting documents in an information retrieval system and describes a study that used an OCR-generated database and its corresponding corrected version to examine query evaluation in the presence of noisy data. Scanning technology, recognition technology, and retrieval technology are…

Evaluates the effectiveness of spelling-correction and string-similarity matching methods in retrieving similar words in a Malay dictionary associated with a set of query words. Describes experiments that showed the best search combination used a stemming algorithm, and calculates retrieval effectiveness and relevant means measures from weighted…

Describes an investigation of the relationship between the levels of interlinker consistency obtained among a group of full-text databases in which internodal links were inserted, and the effectiveness of searches carried out in those databases. Topics include interindexer consistency and retrieval system evaluation. (Author/LRW)

Describes and discusses the findings of an experiment that tested the precision of full-text retrieval enhanced by 29 document term weighting algorithms at the lowest, middle, and highest levels of recall, and compared with the precision of full-text retrieval without algorithms and with paragraph retrieval. (29 references) (Author/CLB)

Considers a new approach to construction of single-valued measures for evaluation of search results. A general statement of the order preservation property is given, and all considered single-valued measures are analyzed for the existence of this property. Problems of legitimacy of the use of single-valued measures in various situations are…

Discusses suffix stripping algorithms used in information retrieval to cluster words derived from a common root under the same stem, and proposes a suffixing algorithm for French which uses grammatical categories to enhance the stemming process. An evaluation of the algorithm is discussed, and an analysis of errors is described. (17 references)…

A comparison of the effectiveness of information retrieval based on full-text documents with retrieval based on paragraphs, abstracts, or controlled vocabularies was accomplished using a subset of journal articles with nine search questions. It was found that full-text retrieval achieved significantly higher recall and lower precision than did the…

Explores the use of citation data in evaluating research performance of academic programs and individual faculty members based on a 10-year analysis of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. The use of three methods conjointly for allocating citational credit to multiauthored works is discussed. (Contains 35…

Discussion of information retrieval highlights DalText, a prototype information retrieval system that provides access to nonindexed textual data files where the mode of access is determined by the user based on the task at hand. A user study is described that was conducted at Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia) to test DalText. (Contains 23…