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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 01
IRList Digest Sunday, 24 January 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 1
Today's Topics:
Email - Welcome message with latest info on submission, etc.
Announcement - Free text retrieval software for Mac, SUN, VAX, etc.
Abstracts - Software Psychology Society Newsletter for Winter 1988
News addresses are
Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 88 13:13:35 est
From: fox (Ed Fox)
Subject: welcome message to IRList to start off the year
Welcome to the IRList. I am the moderator of the IRList discussion.
I am responsible for composing the digest from pending submissions,
controlling the volume and frequency of mail, keeping an archive, and
answering administrative requests. You may submit material for the
digest to a variety of places, depending on what network you are on
and how quickly and reliably you want mail to reach me. We do not
have to pay for mail deliveries, but they do vary in speediness and
reliability. Possibilities include:
If on ARPANET and can use domains, or on CSNET, use
fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu
If on ARPANET and can't use domains use
fox%vtopus.cs.vt.edu@csnet-relay.arpa
If on BITNET, use foxea@vtvax3
If on UUCPNET, use something like
... seismo!vtvax3.bitnet!foxea
As you might expect, archival copies of all digests will be kept; feel
free to ask for recent back issues. Note that FTP is now finally
possible but details have yet to be worked out regarding access. Meanwhile,
all communication must be by EMAIL or phone or letter. IRList is open
to discussion of any topic (vaguely) related to information retrieval.
Certainly, any material relating to ACM SIGIR (the Special Interest
Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing
Machinery) is of interest. Our field has close ties to artificial
intelligence, database management, information and library science,
linguistics, ... A partial list of topics suitable are:
Information Management/Processing/Science/Technology
AI Applications to IR Hardware aids for IR
Abstracting Hypertext and Hypermedia
CD-ROM / CD-I / ... Indexing/Classification
Citations Information Display/Presentation
Cognitive Psychology Information Retrieval Applications
Communications Networks Information Theory
Computational Linguistics Knowledge Representation
Computer Science Language Understanding
Cybernetics Library Science
Data Abstraction Message Handling
Dictionary analysis Natural Languages, NL Processing
Document Representations Optical disc technology and applications
Electronic Books Pattern Recognition, Matching
Evidential Reasoning Probabilistic Techniques
Expert Systems in IR Speech Analysis
Expert Systems use of IR Statistical Techniques
Full-Text Retrieval Thesaurus construction
Fuzzy Set Theory
Contributions may be anything from tutorials to rampant speculation.
In particular, the following are sought:
Abstracts of Papers,Reports,Dissertations Address Changes
Bibliographies Conference Reports
Descriptions of Projects/Laboratories Half-Baked Ideas
Histories Humorous,Enlightening Anecdotes
Questions Requests
Research Overviews Seminar Announcements/Summaries
Work Planned or in Progress
The only real boundaries to the discussion are defined by the topics
of other mailing lists. Please do not send communications to both
this list and AIList or the Prolog list, except in special cases.
I will try not to overlap much with NL-KR, except when we both receive
materials from contributors or from some bulletin board or researchers.
PLEASE "sign" subscriptions with full name and address so that people
can access you from Internet and/or BITNET (many other networks can be
reached through them and are certainly urged to participate). Editing
of contributions will usually be limited to text justifications and
spelling corrections. Editorial remarks and elisions will be marked
with square brackets. The author will be contacted if significant
editing is required. I have no objection to distributing material
that is destined for conference proceedings or any other publication.
I support ACM SIGIR Forum and unless you request otherwise may encourage
inclusion of submissions in whole or in part in future paper versions of
the FORUM. Indeed, this is one form of solicitation for FORUM
contributions! Both IRList and the FORUM are unrefereed, and opinions
are always those of the author and not of any organization unless
there are other indications. Copies of list items should credit the
original author, not necessarily the IRList. If you are interested in
submitting to Information Processing and Management (IP&M), I would to
entertain a discussion with you as well. Also with The Laserdisk
Professional, a new publication about CD-ROM and optical discs.
The list does not assume copyright, nor does it accept any liability
arising from remailing of submitted material. Further, no liability
is accepted for use of such materials for information retrieval research,
including distribution of test collections. I reserve the right,
however, to refuse to remail any contribution that I judge to be of
commercial purpose, obscene, libelous, irrelevant, or pointless.
Replies to public requests for information should be sent, at least
in "carbon" form, to this list unless the request states otherwise.
If necessary, I will digest or abstract the replies to control the
volume of distributed mail. However, PLEASE DO contribute! I would
rather deal with too much material than with too little. -- Ed Fox
Edward A. Fox, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science,
Virginia Tech (VPI&SU), McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
(703) 961-5113 or 6931
------------------------------
Date: 27 Dec 87 09:35 EST
From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann)
Subject: free text retrieval software for SUN, VAX, Macintosh
Hi there! Ed, if you could forward this note to SUN-SPOTS and/or to Igor
Metz, who asked about text retrieval software for the Sun, I'd greatly
appreciate it -- I am terrible at figuring out addresses to send things to
from here, and my mailer is even worse.
I wrote up a bunch of programs in C about 6 months ago that run on Sun,
VAX, Macintosh, etc., which generate simple complete inverted indices to
every word in an ascii text file. (Leaving out 'stop words' turns out to
be something of a waste of the computer's time and doesn't save a significant
amount of disk space either.) If anybody wants to see copies of the best
of these programs, 'qndxr.c' and 'brwsr.c', and can get me an address on
the net to send them to (from arpanet, from a picky mailer) I'd be more
than happy to do so.
'qndxr.c' is about 50 kB long, including comments, and seems pretty
transportable ... I've sent out dozens of copies and haven't heard of
any bugs from the latest version. It takes an arbitrarily-large text
file (disk space limits you, until you get to 2 or 4 GB where my 32-bit
pointers run out) and breaks it up into chunks that fit into memory,
then does a quicksort on pointers to every word in the chunk, and writes
the resulting chunks of index files to disk ... then, it goes through
and merges the chunks of index together until there is a single (pair)
of index files (one holding keys, the other holding pointers to every
occurrence of words). Very very simple ... I'm working on extensions,
but more on that later.
Current version seems to build indices at roughly 10-15 MB/hour pace
on a Sun or Mac II, and at 3-4 MB/hour on a Mac Plus....
'brwsr.c' lets you browse through the index ... gives you a display of
words and their occurrence rates, like:
100 aardvark
9876 aaron
21 aarons
etc. If you are interested in aardvarks, you can pop down into a
complete key-word-in-context display of the occurrences of the string
aardvark (all 100 of them), like:
was eaten by a voracious aardvark in 1492, when his boat landed...
took the left leg of his aardvark and painted it blue without a...
among the earliest known aardvark civilizations. Now it can be...
etc. Then, if any of these lines of the KWIC display look promising,
you can pop down into the full text around that chosen line, and
read, copy to a file of notes, etc. The C code for brwsr is also about
50 kB long including comments.
I have been spending the past few weeks rewriting most of the above to
integrate it into HyperCard (Macintosh program ... my routines become
external functions and commands) ... should have some good stuff to
start distributing in a few weeks, if all goes well. My sabbatical
time is running out, so my work will be slower next year, alas.
Oh, I forgot to mention, 'brwsr.c' above has simple proximity searching ...
you can define a working subset of the dataspace as, for example, only
to include words within a few sentences of '1492', for instance, in
which case the index display shows the counts in that subset, e.g.,
1/100 aardvark
17/9876 aaron
2/21 aarons
etc. Now, if you ask for a KWIC display of aardvark, you only see the
one occurrence in the neighborhood of '1492'.
I use my Macintosh versions of brwsr and qndxr all the time ... have
accumulated over 12 MB of text from the past year or so of arpanet
and usenet and delphi digests, mostly related to Macintosh programming,
information retrieval, etc. -- it's easy to browse and pull out tidbits
that I vaguely recall the existence of.
As stated earlier, the programs are free (at the moment), but I can't
afford to spend a lot of time distributing them or supporting them at
that price, and my time will be even scarcer starting next week.
Best, ^z (Mark Zimmermann, 'science@nems.arpa')
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 87 16:50:37 EST
Subject: Software Psychology Newsletter - Winter 1988
From: ("Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>") <ben%MIMSY.UMD.EDU@UMD2>
...
Happy New Year...Ben
___________________________________________
SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY
POTOMAC CHAPTER
VOLUME 12 NUMBER 2 WINTER 1988
Note: All meetings will be held at the George Washington University's Mar-
vin Center (800 21st Street, N.W.) between 10:00 AM and noon. Coffee and
doughnuts will be provided by the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences.
Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology Society, c/o
Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD
20851.
____________________
January 8
Room 413-414
PERCEPTION AND COMPREHENSION OF
COLOR CHARACTERS ON COLOR BACKGROUNDS
John T. Christian (1) and Bruce H. Thomas (2)
Computer Sciences Corporation, System Sciences Division
8728 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring, MD
(1) now at CSC, 4600 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD 20705
(2) now at National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD 20899
Often during the design of a user-system interface, human factors engineers
are asked if and how color can be used to code information. Frequently the
response is that color can be used but in limited ways (e.g., follow cultural
stereotypes and use less than six colors). On the other hand, designers and
practitioners in the software field (e.g., word processing and presentation
graphics) have used color, sometimes in highly artistic ways, to enhance pro-
cessing of presented information. With the advent of improved high resolution
color graphics monitors, more people want to use color coding presumably as a
strategy to improve productivity. The basis for making color coding deci-
sions, for example in a word processing task, are unclear at best.
In an attempt to sort out the consequences of color coding information for
user productivity, several experiments were conducted. We investigated the
effects of color character - color background combinations on people's percep-
tion and comprehension of information in a timed target detection and reading
comprehension tasks. In two other studies, we examined cultural stereotypes
for coding meteorological parameters. The mixed results may serve as a
palette to color future decisions on color coding.
____________________
February 12 Room 413-414
THE OPERATING PERSONNEL PERFORMANCE MODEL:
AN AID TO DESIGNERS OF AUTOMATED SYSEMS
Sylvia B. Sheppard, Elizabeth D. Murphy, Lisa J. Stewart
Computer Technology Associates, Inc.,
14900 Sweitzer Lane, Laurel, MD 20702
Walter Truszkowski, NASA Goddard Space Center, Greenbelt, MD
A theoretical model has been designed to predict the performance of users of
automated systems. The Operating Personnel Performance Model is based on the
premise that user performance in control rooms can be predicted from a
knowledge of the cognitive, sensory, and motor demands imposed on the users in
the performance of their tasks and from a knowledge of the capabilities
required to meet those demands. Two studies, related to the Network Control
Center (NCC) and the Georgia Tech. Multi-Satellite Operations Control Center
(GT-MSOCC) at NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center, were conducted to test the
model's predictive validity. The results supported the conclusion that the
model is an aid in the rapid, systematic evaluation of design alternatives.
____________________
March 11
Room 413-414
USER-CENTERED DESIGN OF
AN INTELLIGENT DATABASE SYSTEM
Eizabeth Roop, Carlow Associates Incorporated
8315 Lee Highway, Suite 410, Fairfax, VA 22031
To facilitate the dissemination of its collection and compilation of UCI
(User-Computer Interface) reports and literature, U.S. Army's Human Engineer-
ing Lab is applying an intense R&D effort toward a fully automated, intelli-
gent database system. Specifications for this state-of-the-technology system
were based on user preferences, determined by surveys of the intended users of
the system, and a review of the current literature for both hardware and
software techniques.
Results from early testing of the prototype will be presented. The prototype
includes hardware to scan documents for rapid data entry, a character recogni-
tion server to divide the data into separate ASCII and bitmap files, and the
latest in WORM (Write Once Read Many) drive technology. HEL's database sys-
tem is supported by an intelligent front end, which provides new features for
a traditional query and retrieval subsystem, hypertext capability, and per-
sonal files.
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END OF IRList Digest
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