A new testing process is described. The design of the test procedure is covered in detail, and the several language processing features incorporated into the SMART system are individually evaluated. (20 references) (Author)

The abstracts obtained so far are of sufficiently good quality to indicate that large-scale testing of the methods of the automatic abstracting system is warranted. (Author/MM)

Experiments with two distinct collections, using three levels of indexing exhaustively for both documents and requests, show that substantially the same performance is obtained for very different levels of document indexing, if suitable choices are made of request level. (6 references) (Author)

Because of an absence of theory, rules and conventions for thesaurus construction and maintenance, an investigation of how thesauri are actually updated was conducted. Two concepts crucial to any theoretical foundation of thesauri and two techniques for systematic updating of a thesaurus are presented for consideration. (46 references) (Author/KE)

An operational, comprehensive, economical method for updating and correcting entries in a computerized bibliographic system is presented. The technique was developed in connection with the East African Agricultural Bibliographic Project at West Virginia University. Data modification operations are discussed as well as the limitations of the method…

A new technique, known as discrimination value analysis, ranks the text words in accordance with how well they are able to discriminate the documents of a collection from each other. (Author/PF)

A uniterm keyword system is explained which is thought to be suitable for small information centers operated by a staff of one or two. (3 references) (Author)

The question is asked: Of index terms assigned to documents, which function most effectively in retrieval, the most used or popular terms, or those which are used relatively infrequently? The experiment is a retrieval experiment and uses the Cranfield-Salton data. (14 references) (Author)

The utilization of all or most of the different possibilities to find prescribed descriptors, identifiers or new index terms in thesauri is aided by using a flow chart which is applicable to most indexing aids--thesauri or subject heading lists. (9 references) (Author)

The relative retrieval efficiency of the title searching technique and the index term searching technique is so close that the choice of one method or the other must be primarily on economic grounds. (9 references) (Author)

The experimental results obtained by testing the main hypotheses indicated that there was no difference between the two indexing methods compared, indexing from an alphabetical list alone, and indexing with the suggestion lists as a supplement to the alphabetical list. (Author/MM)

Presents an overview of artificial-intelligence-based inductive learning techniques and their use in information science research. Three methods are discussed: the connectionist Hopfield network; the symbolic ID3/ID5R; evolution-based genetic algorithms. The knowledge representations and algorithms of these methods are examined in the context of…

Describes the development and application of an algorithm that generates non-linear representations of English text. It appears that the representation it produces could be quite useful in automatic language processing. (JB)