IRList Digest Tuesday, 25 August 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 31 Today's Topics: Announcement - Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum (part 3 of 4) News addresses are ARPANET: fox%vtopus.cs.vt.edu@relay.cs.net BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet CSNET: fox@vt UUCPNET: fox@vtopus.uucp ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:17:43 CDT From: nancy@usl-vb.usl.edu (Nancy ) Subject: Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum - sent by Raghavan ABSTRACTS (part 3 of 4) 20. OUTLINES OF THE EMERGING PARADIGM IN CATALOGUING Roy Davies The University Library University of Exeter Stocker Road Exeter, EX4 4PT, Great Britain The basic principles of cataloguing were originally formulated in the 19th century and still enjoy general acceptance in the form of the Paris Principles. Initially, automation was simply a matter of producing con- ventional catalogues in a new way. However, the introduction of online systems makes possible searching modes for which the catalogues were not originally designed. Thus, technological progress accompanied by rising user expectations and economic pressures could lead to a breakdown of the present paradigm. The use of concepts from artificial intelligence could help us to exploit knowledge of cataloguing to a greater extent than is done at present. The description of books and the like and the determina- tion of access points could be specified in terms of frames and production rules, respectively. Such developments would not make cataloguing a largely automatic process, as at present we do not properly understand the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of title pages, although some possible heuristics are listed in the Appendix. A knowledge engineering approach to cataloguing should assist in the development of an improved code. If successful, such an approach would constitute a change of paradigm. (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 89-98, 1987) 21. GETTING STARTED IN LIBRARY EXPERT SYSTEMS RESEARCH Harold Broko Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of California at Los Angeles 405 Hilgard Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90024 In the 1960's, information science researchers pioneered in the design of computer-based document storage and retrieval systems. These efforts were crowned with success, and online systems are now in common use as reference tools. Today the new information science frontier is to design, develop, and to test expert systems for use in libraries and other infor- mation centers. At UCLA we are exploring the applicability of artificial intelligence and expert systems for modeling the cognitive processes involved in cataloging. Specifically, Zorana Ercegovac, a doctoral stu- dent, is designing a prototype expert system in the limited domain of map cataloging that will seek to employ the reasoning used by expert cata- logers in applying AACR2 rules. It is anticipated that the research results will shed some light on the way catalogers reason and conceptual- ize the structure of a catalog entry. The project is still in its initial stages, and in this presentation one can only indicate the design choices that need to be made, the reason for the decisions made, and the problems encountered. (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 81-87, 1987) 22. A MODEL FOR THE STOPPING BEHAVIOR OF USERS OF ONLINE SYSTEMS Paul B. Kantor Tantalus, Inc. 3257 Ormond Road Cleveland, Ohio 44118 We examine a model in which the user of an online system continually updates his/her estimated probability of success, and quits or continues according to the expected utility of each action. The prior distribution of the unknown probability is a beta distribution, with mean determined by the a priori expectation of success, and variance determined by the confi- dence with which the user has that prior expectation. The stopping cri- terion depends upon the accumulated number of positive and negative rein- forcements, and is a straight line in a suitable coordinate system. (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 211-214, 1987) 23. ETHICS AND INFORMATION SCIENCE Manfred Kochen Mental Health Research Institute University of Michigan 205 Washtenaw Place Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0010 The challenge of ethical problem solving in the context of the information-science professions has fostered debate over whether a code of ethics might not provide a valuable guide to decision making in situations involving ethical conflicts. Sample issues and questions are presented with an aim toward placing them in historical and philosophical frameworks for considering the tension between knowledge and power. While the arti- cle concludes that ethical choices are too dynamic and unpredicatable to make a fixed code useful, practical guidelines to help information profes- sionals act out of wisdom are offered. (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 206-210, 1987) 24. KNOWLEDGE-BASED INDEXING OF THE MEDICAL LITERATURE: THE INDEXING AID PRO- JECT Susanne M. Humphrey and Nancy E. Miller National Library of Medicine Bethesda, MD 20894 This article describes the Indexing Aid Project for conducting research in the areas of knowledge representation and indexing for information retrieval in order to develop interactive knowledge-based systems for computer-assisted indexing of the periodical medical literature. The sys- tem uses an experimental frame-based knowledge representation language. FrameKit, implemented in Franz Lisp. The initial prototype is designed to interact with trained MEDLINE indexers who will be prompted to enter sub- ject terms as slot values in filling in document-specific frame data structures that are derived from the knowledge-base frames. In addition, the automatic application of rules associated with the knowledge-base frames produces a set of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) keyword indices to the document, important features of the system are representation of explicit relationships through slots which express the relations; slot values, restrictions, and rules made available by inheritance through ``is-a'' hierarchies; slot values denoted by functions that retrieve values from other slots; and restrictions on slot values displayable dur- ing data entry. (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 184-196, 1987) 25. COMPUTATION OF TERM/DOCUMENT DISCRIMINATION VALUES BY USE OF THE COVER COEFFICIENT CONCEPT Fazli Can Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey and Esen A. Ozkarahan Department of Computer Science Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287 Indexing in information retrieval (IR) is used to obtain a suitable vocabulary of index terms and optimum assignment of these terms to docu- ments for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of an IR system. The concept of term discrimination value (TDV) is one of the criteria used for index-term selection. In this article a new concept called the cover coefficient (CC) will be used in computing TDVs. After a brief introduc- tion to the theory of indexing and the CC concept, an efficient way of computing TDVs by use of the CC concept, index-term selection, and weight modification are discussed. It is also shown that the computational cost of the CC approach in the calculation of TDVs is favorably comparable to the cost of a different approach that uses similarity coefficients. Furthermore, the TDVs obtained by the CC approach are consistent with those of the latter approach. (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 171-183, 1987) 26. HISTORICAL NOTE: PERSPECTIVES Cyril Cleverdon (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 152-155, 1987) 27. HISTORICAL NOTE: PERSPECTIVES Allen Kent Distinguished Service Professor Interdisciplinary Department of Information Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15228 (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 147-151, 1987) 28. AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM FOR DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL IN DISTRIBUTED OFFICE Uttam Mukhopadhyay, Larry M. Stephens, Michael N. Huhns, and Ronald D. Bonnell Center for Machine Intelligence University of South Carolina Columbia, SC 29208 MINDS (Multiple Intelligence Node Document Servers) is a distributed system of knowledge-based query engines for efficiently retrieving mul- timedia documents in an office environment of distributed workstations. By learning document distribution patterns, as well as user interests and preferences during system usage, it customizes document retrievals for each user. A two-layer learning system has been implemented for MINDS. The knowledge base used by the query engine is learned at the lower level with the help of heuristics for assigning credit and recommending adjust- ments; these heuristics are incrementally refined at the upper level. (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 123-135, 1986) 29. BAROQUE: A BROWSER FOR RELATIONAL DATABASES Amihai Motro University of Southern California Department of Computer Science Los Angeles, CA 90089 The standard, most efficient method to retrieve information from data- bases can be described as systematic retrieval: The needs of the user are described in a formal query, and the database management system retrieves the data promptly. There are several situations, however, in which sys- tematic retrieval is difficult or even impossible. In such situations exploratory search (browsing) is a helpful alternative. This paper describes a new user interface, called BAROQUE, that implements explora- tory searches in relational databases. BAROQUE requires few formal skills from its users. It does not assume knowledge of the principles of the relational data model or familiarity with the organization of the particu- lar database being accessed. It is especially helpful when retrieval tar- gets are vague or cannot be specified satisfactorily. BAROQUE establishes a view of the relational database that resembles a semantic network, and provides several intutive functions for scanning it. The network integrates both schema and data, and supports access by value. BAROQUE can be implemented on top of any basic relational database management system but can be modified to take advantage of additional capabilities and enhancements often present in relational systems. (ACM TRANSACTIONS ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 164- 181, 1986) [Note: continued in next issue - Ed] ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************