Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

The ability to predict a student's performance could be useful in a great number of different ways associated with university-level learning. In this paper, a grammar guided genetic programming algorithm, G3P-MI, has been applied to predict if the student will fail or pass a certain course and identifies activities to promote learning in a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Rosetta, an indexing and retrieval system indexes papers in a collection based on the way they have been described when referenced by other papers in the collection. Using Rosetta, simple natural language queries retrieve high-precision results in which descriptions based on citations clearly summarize retrieved papers, allowing users to quickly…

The Human Use Regulatory Affairs Advisor (HURAA) is an Internet facility that provides help and training on the ethical use of human subjects in research, based on documents and regulations in United States Federal agencies. HURAA has a number of standard features of conventional web facilities and computer-based training, such as hypertext,…

Describes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Lexical Dictionary (NLD), a machine-aided indexing system used online at the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI). The functions of NLD system components are described in detail, and production and quality benefits resulting from machine-aided indexing at CASI are…

Discusses information retrieval systems and the need to have them adapt to user needs, integrate information in any format, reveal patterns and trends in information, and answer questions. Topics include statistics and probability; natural language processing; intelligent agents; concept mapping; machine-aided indexing; text mining; filtering;…