this document, text or image about?' Gradually moving from the left to the right in Figure 3.1, different understandings of this concept evolve

This paper introduces a novel user interface that integrates search and browsing of very large category hierarchies with their associated text collections. A key component is the separate but simultaneous display of the representations of the categories and the retrieved documents. Another key component is the display ofmultiple selected categories simultaneously, complete with their hierarchical context. The prototype implementation uses animation and a three-dimensional graphical workspace to accommodate the category hierarchy and to store intermediate search results. Query specification in this 3D environment is accomplished via a novel method for painting Boolean queries over a combination of category labels and free text. Examples are shown on a collection of medical text.

this article owes as much to Bush's fame at the time (he had been director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinating all U.S. technology efforts during the war) as to the actual article itself

: This research presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Using a variation of the automatic thesaurus generation techniques, to which we refer as the concept space approach, we aimed to create graphs of domain-specific concepts (terms) and their weighted co-occurrence relationships for all major engineering domains. Merging these concept spaces and providing traversal paths across different concept spaces could potentially help alleviate the vocabulary (difference) problem evident in large-scale information retrieval. We have experimented previously with such a technique for a smaller molecular biology domain (Worm Community System, with 10+ MBs of document collection) with encouraging results. In order to address the scalability issue related to large-scale information retrieval and analysis for the current Illinois DLI project, we recently conducted experiments using the concept sp...

We show that two simple constraints, when applied to short user queries (on the order of 5--10 words) can yield precision scores comparable to or better than those achieved using long queries (50--85 words) at low document cutoff levels. These constraints are meant to detect documents that have subtopic passages that includes the most important components of the query. The constraints are: (i) a simple Boolean constraint which requires the user to specify the query as a list of topics; this list is converted into a conjunct of disjuncts by the system, and (ii) a subtopic-sized proximity constraint imposed over the Boolean constraint. The vector space model is used to rank the documents that satisfy both constraints. Experiments run over 45 TREC queries show significant, almost consistent improvements over rankings that use no constraints. These results have important ramifications for interactive systems intended for casual users, such as those searching on the World Wide Web. 1 Introd...

ueries using all search facets identified from requests, low complexity was achieved by formulating queries with major facets only. Query expansion was based on a thesaurus, from which the expansion keys were elicited for queries. There were five expansion types: (1) the first query version was an unexpanded, original query with one search key for each search concept (original search concepts) elicited from the test thesaurus; (2) the synonyms of the original search keys were added to the original query; (3) search keys representing the narrower concepts of the original search concepts were added to the original query; (4) search keys representing the associative concepts of the original search concepts were added to the original query; (5) all previous expansion keys were cumulatively added to the original query. Query structure refers to the syntactic structure of a query expression, marked with query operators and parentheses. The structure of queries was either weak (queries with n

Abstract-Relational Data Base Management Systems offer a commercially available tool with which to build effective document retrieval systems. The full potential of the relational model for supporting the kind of ad hoc inquiry characteristic of document retrieval has only recently been explored. In addition, commercially available relational DBMS’s also provide effective tools for managing document data bases by providing facilities for, inter alia, concurrency control, data migration and reorganization routines, authorization mechanisms, enforcement of integrity constraints, dynamic data definition, etc. This article will present a relational logical model to support a sophisticated document retrieval system in which flexible forms of inferential and associative searching can be performed. Examples of ad hoc inquiry will be presented in SQL. Several problems of particular importance to document retrieval will be discussed, including the importance of Conjunctive Normal Form in query formulation, unique aspects of document retrieval storage and processing overhead, and techniques for reducing the size of storage without severely impacting retrieval effectiveness. 1.

Information Retrieval Systems identify content bearing words, and possibly also assign weights, as part of the process of formulating requests. For optimal retrieval efficiency, it is desirable that this be done automatically. This paper defines the notion of serial-clustering of words in text, and explores the value of such clustering as an indicator of a word's bearing content. This approach is flexible in the sense that it is sensitive to context: a term may be assessed as content-bearing within one collection, but not another. Our approach, being numerical, may also be of value in assigning weights to terms in requests. Experimental support is obtained from natural text databases in three different languages. 1. Introduction and Background Automatic Information Retrieval (IR) has in the past been based on global word-counts --- the only indicators previously available for assessing the content-bearing strength of words. But the advent of full text databases has created new possibi...

This paper summarizes three lines of research that are motivated by the practical problem of helping users find information from external data sources, most notably computers. The application areas include information retrieval, text categorization, and question answering. Acommon theme in these applications is that practical information access problems can be solved by analyzing the statistical properties of words in large volumes of real world texts. The same statistical properties constrain human performance, thus we believe that solutions to practical information access problems can shed light on human knowledge representation and reasoning.

Modern fact databases contain abundant data classified through several classifications.