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IRList Digest Volume 3 Number 31
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
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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]
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END OF IRList Digest
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