The technique described enables an on line computer based information retrieval system to aid indexers by selecting possible indexing terms to be assigned to a new document entering the system. The economic aspect of implementing the technique in a working information retrieval system is considered. (16 references) (Author/MM)

Presents criteria for an effective syntagmatic relator system and describes how conceptual syntagmatic relationships are expressed in natural language, commenting on the adequacy of such expressions for document retrieval systems. Only one type of expression, a gestalt structure, represented as a frame, conforms to the criteria. (Author/JKP)

Describes the use of FAMULUS, a database management system, to teach library science students at Case Western Reserve University indexing, computerized file construction, and online information retrieval. The special features of FAMULUS and their use in course instruction are outlined and evaluated. A 19-item reference list is attached. (Author/JL)

The complete report, ERIC document ED 022 494, is abstracted in the February 1969 "Research in Education.

A test was carried out to investigate the assumption that there is a significant level of redundancy between documents. The conclusions were that notional overlap exists, but there appear to be very few cases of extreme redundancy, and at the document level, there is little possibility of practical application. (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 retrieval decision problem is considered from the viewpoint of a decision theory approach. A threshold rule based on earlier rules for indexing decisions is considered and analyzed for retrieval decisions as a measure of retrieval performance. The threshold rule is seen as a good descriptive design measure of what a reasonable retrieval system…

Investigates the feasibility of using a distance measure for automatic sequential document classification. This property of the distance measure is used to design a sequential classification algorithm which classifies key words and analyzes them separately in order to assign primary and secondary classes to a document. (VT)

Design equations are derived for three types of retrieval systems. The equation in each case shows the relationship between expected search length, used as a performance measure, and certain system characteristics having to do with the distribution of index terms over the document collection and the number of errors in the search requests. (MF)

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…

The purpose of the study was to determine how many questions judged relevant to an article are also judged relevant using different length representations of the article, and how this proportion changes as the length of the representation changes. Several persons made relevance judgments for each of a set of articles to each of a set of questions.…

Introduced are methods for computation of term-term association factors, indexing, assignment of term-document relevance values, and computation for recall and relevance. Recall and relevance are based on quantitative intenal system computations, and results are compared with user evaluations. (Author/MF)

An evaluation of graph theoretical clusters of index terms which can be extracted from an automatically indexed document collection, and the effects of employing such clusters in automatic document retrieval are described. (19 references) (Author)

Some problems encountered with the ERIC indexing system in efforts to retrieve information from the ERIC files are discussed. (4 references) (Author/NH)

Discusses the overlap of research in artificial intelligence and information retrieval, focusing on the papers included in this special issue of Information Processing and Management. Highlights include the emphasis on evaluation and testing in prior research and use of manual and automatic indexing, expert systems, knowledge representation, and…