IRList Digest Monday, 10 Feb 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 7 Today's Topics: Email - Change in Origin of IRList Query - Book Review and Request for Additional Info Cog-Sci Seminars - Understanding Spoken Language - Applied Expert Systems, Syntactic Categories ... Abstracts - Articles selected by Salton or Raghavan (pt. 1 of 3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From fox Mon Feb 3 09:40 EST 1986 Subject: Changing of site of origin of IRlist Dear IRList Subscribers, In the interest of reliability and cost savings, IRlist will be sent from seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq instead of fox%vpi@csnet-relay To be sure there is no mishap, Issue 7 is being sent from irlistrq with this message, and Issue 8 is being sent from the CSNET address above. If you receive one issue but not the other, please notify me at one of the addresses given below. Also, if you are missing any issues (V1 1-28, V2 1-8), feel free to contact me if you can't get a copy from another user or site. I hope this works smoothly! - Ed __________________________________________________________________ UUCP: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq ARPA: vtisr1!irlistrq@seismo foxea@vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm fox@vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm fox%vpi@csnet-relay CSNET:fox@vpi BITNET:foxea@vtvax3 fox@vtcs1 ------------------------------ From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY Date: Sat, 1 Feb 86 14:30 EST Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 24 [extract - Ed] -- NANCY WYATT QUERY ON ONLINE RESEARCH From NJW at PSUVM I recently picked up a book in my local library titled ONLINE RESEARCH AND RETRIEVAL WITH MICROCOMPUTERS, written by Nahum Goldmann and published by TAB Books (who publish various computer related books). Goldmann pointed out that online information services vary widely in cost and usefulness and most of them are set up so only computer experts can use them effectively. On the other hand, the specialists who do computer searches are seldom equipped to discriminate which information is useful and which is not. In response to this need he has developed a system whereby experts can develop research strategies that can be run by experts but will net more useful information for less money. The book is very clearly written and contains a lot of illustrations from actual computer searches. The examples used in the book were from medicine and biology. I am interested in what applications online research and retrieval may have for communication research. I wonder if any other readers have experience with such research and would be willing to share their knowledge with us. I'd like to know which services would have useful information, how much such services might cost, and how one goes about learning to use the services. There are probably a lot of other questions I haven't thought of, since I don't have any experience of the beast. Nancy Wyatt, Penn State ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1986 10:58 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Date: Friday, 31 January 1986 10:00-EST From: etzi%oz.ai.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu Subject: Harvard-Radcliffe Cognitive Sciences Society Sunday, 2 February 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room Harvard 5:30 dinner [can be purchused] 6:00 talk. HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY "Understanding Spoken Language" Bill Woods Applied Expert Systems Harvard Computer Science Department ------------------------------ Subject: From: Peter de Jong Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1986 09:51 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Date: Friday, 31 January 1986 10:00-EST From: etzi%oz.ai.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu Subject: Harvard-Radcliffe Cognitive Sciences Society Sunday, 2 February 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room Harvard 5:30 dinner [can be purchused] 6:00 talk. HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY Bill Woods Applied Expert Systems Harvard Computer Science Department Date: Friday, 31 January 1986 10:00-EST Subject: Syntactic Categories and Semantic Types Thursday, 6 February 10:30am Room: BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street,Cambridge 3rd Floor Large Conference Room BBN Labs SDP AI Seminar SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES AND SEMANTIC TYPES Professor Barbara H. Partee Linguistics and Philosophy Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst There is a tension between the uniform, systematic syntax-semantics connection imposed by a strongly typed system like Montague's and the apparent flexibility and versatility of natural languages. Words and phrases can easily shift their meanings within or across types, but not in arbitrary ways. I am searching for a characterization of "natural" families of meanings and "natural" meaning-shifting operations, focussing on type-shifting operations. The examples I will discuss in greatest detail involve type-shifting among three types of noun phrase interpretations: 'referential' or e-type, 'predicative' or -type, and 'quantificational' or <,t>-type. I suggest that all NP's have meanings of the quantificational type, and that we can formulate quite general principles for predicting which ones will also have meanings of one or both of the other types. If there is time I will briefly discuss type-shifting among adjective and adverb interpretations. ------------------------------ From: "V.J. Raghavan" Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:20:08 cst To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY Subject: submission to IR list [long set of abstracts - part 1 of 3, Ed] .op .pl75 blurbs.vr ABSTRACTS (Chosen by G. Salton or V. Raghavan from 1983 issues of journals in the retrieval area) 1. BASICS OF VIDEODISC AND OPTICAL DISK TECHNOLOGY Judith Paris Advanced Information Management Technology, Inc., 1311A Dolley Madison Blvd., McLean, VA 22101 This article outlines basic videodisc and optical disk technology. Both optical and capacitance videodisc technology are described. Optical disk technology as a mass digital image and data storage device is defined and briefly compared with other established information storage media including magnetic tape and microforms. The article includes a look into the future of videodisc and optical disk. (JASIS, Vol. 34(6): 408-413; 1983) 2. RESPONSE TIME VARIATIONS IN AN ONLINE SEARCH SYSTEM Michael D. Cooper School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 The response time characteristics of the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) ELHILL bibliographic search system are examined in this article. Transactions for a five-week period are analyzed and average response times are calculated for typical search commands, by times of day, and by file being searched. Overall, the response time of the system was found to be 2.1 seconds, a very low value. Based on statistical tests of signifcance applied to the data, it was concluded that response time differences can be explained in terms of the number of users on the system and not the command issued by the user nor the file the user searched. (JASIS, Vol. 34(6); 374-380; 1983) 3. AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPUTERS AND HUMANS AS SEARCH INTERMEDIARIES Richard S. Marcus Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139 An experimental computer intermediary system, CONIT, that assists users in accessing and searching heterogeneous retrieval systems has been enhanced with various search aids. Controlled experiments have been conducted to compare the effectiveness of the enhanced CONIT Intermediary with that of human expert intermediary search specialists. Some 16 end users, none of whom had previously operated either CONIT or any of the four connected retrieval systems, performed searches on 20 different topics using CONIT with no assistance other than that provided by CONIT itself (except to recover from computer/software bugs). These same users also performed searches on the same topics with the help of human expert intermediaries who searched using the retrieval system directly. Sometimes CONIT and sometimes the human expert were clearly superior in terms of such parameters as recall and search time. In general, however, users searching alone with CONIT achieved somewhat higher online recall at the expense of longer session times. We conclude that advanced experimental intermediary techniques are now capable of providing search assistance whose effectiveness at least approximates that of human intermediaries in some contexts. Also analyzed is the cost effectiveness of current intermediary systems. Finally, consideration is given to the prospects for much more advanced systems which would perform such functions as automatic database selection and the simulation of human experts, and thereby make information retrieval more effective for all classes of users. (JASIS, Vol. 34(6): 381-404; 1983) 4. CODING METHODS FOR TEXT STRING SEARCH ON COMPRESSED DATABASES P. Goyal Dept. of Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H4B 1R6 A method for the partitioning of a compressed database is presented. The partitioned database is held as an inverted list for ease of string searching. An algorithm for mapping the string onto the search keys is also presented. The analysis shows that it is possible to hold a database as an inverted list and still obtain reasonable compression. (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 231-233, 1983) 5. COMPARISON OF DATABASE INTERFACES FOR APPLICATION PROGRAMMING M. Lacroix and A. Pirotte Philips Research Laboratory, Av, Van Becelaere, 2 box 8, B-1170 Brussles, Belguim The historical evolution of interfaces to databases at the application programming level is analyzed. Emphasis is put on aspects of the data manipulation operations rather than on the data model that they address. Four phases are distinguished in this evolution: "call" interfaces, simple language extensions, non-procedural languages embedded in general purpose languages, and integrated languages. The evolution is explained in terms of the growing needs for more reliable programs written in high level languages, for which programmer efficiency is more important than machine efficiency. (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 217-229, 1983) 6. A DYNAMIC MODEL FOR THE OPTIMAL SELECTION OF SECONDARY INDEXES M. Hatzopoulos Dept. of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931 J.G. Kollias Dept. of Computer Sciences, National Technical University of Athens, 9 Heroon Polytechniou Ave., Zografou, Athens 621, Greece A model is presented which determines the optimal degree of secondry indexing for data processing requirements which follow variations over different time periods in a manner known in advance. The paper proves a number of properties which characterize the model and develops an algorithm which greatly reduces the solution space to be searched. The algorithm uses dynamic programming techniques and it may be used by Database Administrators to determine the time at which the entering and dropping of secondary indexes to and from the database should take place. (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 159-164, 1983) 7. LINGUISTIC MEANING AND LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION Richard L. Derr Matthew A. Baxter School of Information and Library Science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106 Recent developments in cognitive science are assessed as a challenge to the well established view in philosophy of language and linguistics that meaning is inherent to language and is relatively fixed. It is concluded that the challenge is unsuccessful. Current activities in information retrieval which presuppose linguistic meaning are well founded, in that regard. Furthermore, one potential obstacle to the development of information systems which seek to produce comprehension of text has been removed. (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp.369-380, 1983). 8. AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF INFORMATION QUERIES Hanna Grzelak 16, Rue Du Xon, Lesmenils, 54700 Pont-A-Mousson, France Kazimierz Kowalski Main Library and Scientific Information Centre, Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland The methods of information queries building in the SDI systems on the basis of the user's publications are presented in this paper. In most cases the users of the SDI system are scientists whose work is marked by publications resulting from the research they do. It was found that the users' publications may constitute input data for information queries building. The examination of the possibile compability between the user's information queries and his publications consisted of determining the similarity between of a set of keywords indexed from the information query and a set of keywords indexed from the user's publications. Two methods of information query constructions determined by logical operators AND, OR, NOT and a set of weighted keywords are described. (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp.381 1983). 9. BIOMEDICAL CITING STATEMENTS COMPUTER RECOGNITION AND USE TO AID FULL-TEXT RETRIEVAL John O'Connor Center for Information and Computer Science, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015 Citing statements can be used to aid retrieval, to increase the efficiency of citation indexes and for the study of information flow and use. These uses are only feasible on a large scale if computers can identify citing statements within the texts of documents with reasonable accuracy. Computer recognition of multi-sentence citing statements is not easy. Procedures developed for chemistry papers in an earlier experiment were tested on biomedical papers (dealing with various aspects of cancer) and were almost as successful. Specifically, (1) 78% of the words in computer-recognized citing statements were correctly attributable to the corresponding cited papers; and (2) the computer procedures missed 4% of the words in the actual citing statements. When the procedures were modified on the basis of those results and tested on a new sample of cancer papers the results were comparable: 72 and 3% respectively. In an earlier experiment in use of full-text searching to retrieve answer-passages from cancer papers, recall in the "test phase" averaged about 70% and the false retrieval rate was thirteen falsely retrieved sentences per answer- paper retrieved. Unretrieved answer-papers in that experiment's "development phase", and citing statements referring to them, were studied to develop computer procedures for using citing statements to increase recall. The procedures developed only produced slight recall increases for development phase answer-papers, and similarly for the test phase papers on which they were then tested. Specifically, the test phase results were the following: recall was increased from 70 to 74%, and there was no increase in false retrieval. This contrasts with an earlier experiment in which 50% recall of chemistry papers by search of index terms and abstract words was incrased to 70% by the addition of words from citing statements. The difference may be because the average number of citing papers per unretrieved cancer paper was only six while that for chemistry papers was thirteen. (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp.361-368, 1983). 10. A PROPOSAL FOR AN ASSOCIATIVE FILE STORE WITH RUN-TIME INDEXING - PART 1: SYSTEM DESCRIPTION E.J. Schuegraf Dept. of Mathematics and Computing Sciences, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia B2G 1C0 R.M. Lea Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK Information retrieval systems are described and their relation to associative processing is established. An overview of present associative hardware is given, followed by a proposal for an Associative File Sotre (AFS) for online information retrieval systems. Its advantages over conventional file stores in maxi-, mini- and microcomputer systems are outlined. The AFS incorporates a microprogrammed Associative Processor. It is dedicated to high-speed fragment processing, to support file compression, run-time indexing and calculations of storage addresses for records, and file indexing and calculations of storage addresses for records, and file searching. Performance estimates indicate that compared with conventional file stores the AFS could achieve a speed advantage of over two orders of magnitude. Use of fragments for compression approximately doubles the storage capacity; the use of fragments for run-time indexing reduces the volume of data to be searched, but it retains the full flexibility of free text retrieval on variable-length records. (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 2, No. 2/3 pp. 73-88, 1983) ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************