The development of an automatic indexing technique, called Double KWIC (DKWIC) Coordinate Indexing, is described which extends the KWIC indexing principles to provide easy access to an additional level of specificity for information indexed under these frequently appearing terms. Chapter 2 discusses indexing terminology and some fundamental…

Analyzes a study of the effect of controlled variations in indexing vocabulary size on retrieval performance, using the Cranfield 200 and 1400 test collections. Sets of variable-length character strings were tested, in an application of the Cluster Hypothesis and in a series of linear associative retrieval experiments. (Author/SW)

A report of several comparisons designed to measure the retrieval effectiveness of machined-aided indexing and manual indexing. (Author)

The indexing of Cranfield I and II is given and critical comments made of this indexing. Comparisons of Cranfield indexing to other types of indexing are made. (AB)

Describes an experiment comparing the performance of an automatic full-text indexing software for personal computers (i.e., the Quick-Finder facility in WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows) with the human intellectual assignment of indexing terms to each document in a collection. Results are discussed in terms of ease of use, the time factor, and recall…

Some of the factors that must inevitably affect the assessment of printed indexes are discussed, together with the observation of two unexpected phenomena, namely an apparent relationship between precision and searching effort, and relationships between generality and both recall and fallout. (4 references) (Author)

The main purpose of the experiment was to answer the question whether broad or narrow terms function most effectively in the retrieval of relevant documents. The answer depends on what the user of the retrieval system wants, his wants being expressed in terms of stated precision-recall preference, or by the exact number of relevant documents he…

The issue of free-text versus controlled vocabulary is examined. The history of the issue, which is seen as beginning with the debate over title term indexing in the nineteenth century, is reviewed and questions not satisfactorily addressed by previous research are raised. (Author/EM)

Five abstracts journals and one indexing service in the field of library and information science were compared for the efficacy of their subject retrieval performance. (Author)

Summarizes findings from a survey administered to identify indexer opinion of the PRECIS indexing language, notes advantages and disadvantages, and discusses PRECIS's impact on the British library community. (SW)

The retrieval effectiveness of Keywork-In-Context (KWIC) indexing is sought using a simple search simulation which constrains the user to approach a KWIC index with subject keywords and references dictated by a conventional index. A comparison of several KWIC index studies, using various methodologies, shows retrievability ratios of 35 percent -…

Content-based image retrieval is based on the idea of extracting visual features from images and using them to index images in a database. Proposes similarity measures and an indexing algorithm based on information theory that permits an image to be represented as a single number. When used in conjunction with vectors, this method displays…

This experiment used five index languages to form nine different index files to the same collection of documents. Each index term, in each language, was treated in two ways: as an independent English term, and as a coded entry in a faceted-type thesaurus which specified relationships between terms. The performance effect of the thesaurus was then…

Intended to provide the nursing community with a comparative analysis of four major computerized document retrieval systems and one manual system providing coverage of the nursing literature, this study compares the indexing vocabulary, database coverage, and retrieval performance of the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC),…

This book deals with properties of vocabularies for indexing and searching document collections; the construction, organization, display, and maintenance of these vocabularies; and the vocabulary as a factor affecting the performance of retrieval systems. Most of the text is concerned with vocabularies for post-coordinate retrieval systems, with…