On the construction of selection systems

This study was conducted at the Music Library of the Ministry of Information (ML-MOI) and the Music Library of the Cultural Affairs (ML-CA) of Eritrea. The main aim of the study was to designan appropriate Indigenous Music Information Storage and Retrieval System for Eritrea. A quantitative approach was mainly used to obtain data from a purposefully selected sample. The qualitative approach was also used in some research stages. Methods used included documentanalysis, questionnaire, personal interview, focus group discussion and observation. It was found that music data was recorded in a register, which also served as a finding aid. Users’ preference was to search for music by artist, title, producer, occasion, subject or language.Unfortunately this was not possible with the system that was being used since it only allowed searching through the name or initials of an artist. The paper recommends the establishment of an automated indigenous storage and retrieval system to enable registration of indigenous knowledge information, offering facilities for indexing, searching and report generation.

Purpose – People often engage in different information-seeking strategies (ISSs) within a single information-seeking episode. A critical concern for the design of information retrieval (IR) systems is how to provide support for these different behaviors in a manner which searchers can easily understand, navigate and use, as they move from one ISS to another. The purpose of this paper is to describe a dialogue structure that was implemented in an experimental IR system, in order to address this concern. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a user-centered experiment to evaluate the IR systems. Participants were asked to search for information on two different task types, with four different topics per task, in both the experimental system and a baseline system emulating state-of-the-art IR systems. The authors report here the results related explicitly to the use of the experimental system's dialogue structure. Findings – For one of the task types, most participants followed the search steps as predicted in the dialogue structures, and those who did so completed the task in fewer moves. For the other task type, predicted order of moves was often not followed, but participants again used fewer moves when following the predicted order. Results demonstrate that the dialogue structures the authors designed indeed support effective human information behavior patterns in a variety of ways, and that searchers can effectively use a system which changes to support different ISSs. Originality/value – This study shows that it is both possible and beneficial, to design an IR system which can support multiple ISSs, and that such a system can be understood and used successfully.

Searching information retrieval systems is a highly interactive, iterative process that cannot be understood simply by comparing the output of a search session (the “search product”) to a query stated in advance. In this article, we examine evaluation goals and methods for studying information retrieval behavior, drawing examples from our own research and that of others. We limit our review to research that employs online monitoring, also known as transaction log analysis. Online monitoring is one of few methods that can capture detailed data on the search process at a reasonable cost; these data can be used to build quantitative models or to support qualitative interpretations of quantitative results. Monitoring is a data collection technique rather than a research design, and can be employed in experimental or field studies, whether alone or combined with other data collection methods. Based on the research questions of interest, the researcher must determine what variables to collect from each data source, which to treat as independent variables to manipulate, and which to treat as dependent variables to observe effects. Studies of searching behavior often treat search task and searcher characteristics as independent variables and may manipulate other independent variables specific to the research questions addressed. Search outcomes, time, and search paths frequently are treated as dependent variables. We discuss each of these sets of variables, illustrating them with sample results from the literature and from our own research. Our examples are drawn from the Science Library Catalog project, a 7-year study of children's searching behavior on an experimental retrieval system. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of these results for the design of information retrieval systems. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

F. Wilfrid Lancaster has earned a reputation for greatness in the evaluation of information storage and retrieval systems. Many of his extensive contributions stem from his early experience with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) MEDLARS system. His evaluation of the MEDLARS Demand Search Service in 1966 and 1967 was an important landmark as one of the earliest evaluations of a computer-based retrieval system and as the first application of re-call and precision measures in a large, operational database setting. In 1971, his evaluation of the MEDLARS AIM-TWX system was an important study of early online systems and their direct use by end users. This paper summarizes Lancaster’s two major evaluations of the MEDLARS system, including the information environment at the time and their impact in the field of information science. Examples of Lancaster’s other evaluation work with information retrieval systems are provided, followed by discussion of the textbooks that grew out of his evaluation experience and expertise. The article closes with comments from current and former NLM staff regarding Lancaster’s time at NLM or his influence on their own career.

Persons with information needs are faced with determining which potential sources of need satisfaction should be accessed and the order of accession. A reward‐cost theory of behavior provides the structure necessary for postulating various user evaluation functions. Applications of techniques of sequential optimization in search theory yield criteria for determining optimal sequences relative to both the many sources‐one need and many sources‐many needs problems. These criteria are then analyzed relative to the operation of an information storage and retrieval system. It is shown that the information storage and retrieval system has control over the factors which interact to determine the optimal sequences, and the specific role played by each of these factors is investigated. The decision criteria can also be used to optimally order items, services, or search zones.

The maximum entropy principle may be applied to the design of probabilistic retrieval systems. When there are inconsistent expert judgments, the resulting optimization problem cannot be solved. The inconsistency of the expert judgments can be revealed by solving a linear programming formulation. In the case of inconsistent judgment, four plausible schemes are proposed in order to find revised judgments which are consistent with the true data structure but still reflect the original expert judgment. These schemes are the Interactive, Minimum Distance, Minimum Cross-Entropy, and Path methods. © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Information retrieval (IR) systems aim to select relevant material from large collections of information in response to user queries. The approaches used to accomplish this have been the focus of much research and development over the past 50 years, and have led to the algorithms underlying many commercial and Web-based search engines today. This entry describes the common components that go into the design of IR systems (from text processing to inverted file indexes). The major classes (or models) of retrieval algorithms (Boolean, vector, and probabilistic) are described along with formal definitions of the basic form of these algorithms and some of the variations in common use in IR research. In addition, the entry examines query expansion techniques, and in particular relevance feedback, and how they are used in IR systems

this paper provides an in-depth survey of challenges in the design of intelligent information retrieval systems, pointing out some similarities and differences in the core data mining and web based search operations. The procedures for evaluation of search engine performance and implicit feedback of the user with respect to a search result are studied with references to the different algorithms. We have proposed a novel neural satisfaction based feedback vector in contrast to the existing activity pattern based feedback as a future research direction in Intelligent IR. We addressed the select research work in the area of soft information retrieval using fuzzy sets, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and probabilistic information retrieval. As an instance of information retrieval, web mining is a set of operations to retrieve relevant documents from preprocessed, crawled and indexed web, and it can be categorized into more specialized tasks of web content mining, web structure mining and web usage mining. We have given a survey of the important reviews on topic of web mining and its associated tasks. On the basis of Identified challenges in information retrieval in general, and web mining in particular, we have concentrated on applicability of soft computing techniques and their hybrids in web mining, the performance related issues of select solutions, future of web mining and the next generation user's expectations from a search engine.

Traditional information retrieval algorithms ignore user needs and are unable to obtain user gaze coordinates and gaze times, resulting in low retrieval accuracy. The author proposes a new interactive information retrieval algorithm for this purpose. Divide eye tracking technology evaluation indicators, visually process eye movement information, obtain user gaze coordinates and gaze time, and calculate the influence coefficients of each gaze area and each point in the area. Weighted visual words are accumulated to get a visual word list with the weight of the associated area, and visual word list and Rocchio algorithm are combined to build a hidden Relevance feedback retrieval model in semantic space to judge information retrieval preferences. Intelligent robot is introduced, and Jensen Shannon divergence is used to calculate the Kullback–Leibler divergence distance between the probability distributions of document sets, calculate the similarity matching, and complete the interactive information retrieval. The simulation results prove that, due to the introduction of intelligent robot strategy in this method, the amount of irrelevant retrieval information is reduced by matching user needs and retrieval results. Therefore, the amount of messages generated by information retrieval is significantly lower than that of the two literature methods, without adding additional network load. The network system is in a stable operation state, and users can quickly grasp their own required information, and the retrieval speed is also improved to a certain extent. It is proved that the proposed algorithm has high retrieval accuracy, can effectively reduce network load and achieve high-quality human-computer interactive information retrieval.

This paper provides a current and holistic perspective of the citations made to Marcia Bates’s work using a variety of data and citation sources. Further, it will provide new insight into the ways in which Bates’s scholarly work has influenced the design and development of Information Retrieval (IR) systems and search interfaces.

A well-known rule of thumb for evaluating storage rack configurations in automated storage and retrieval (ASR) systems is modified to avoid the need for two key assumptions. These are the proportion of single and dual command order picking cycles used in operating a system and the total storage capacity requirements when randomized versus dedicated storage is used. Procedures for generating ASR system cost estimates are also directly coupled with models for estimating the utilization of storage and retrieval machines. Additional performance criteria for evaluation of alternative rack configurations are proposed. The modified rules of thumb are also designed for implementation on PC-level hardware, but with adequate computational efficiency for analysing a broad range of rack design alternatives in large-scale applications. They are demonstrated using a realistic sample problem.

As the number and diversity of distributed information sources on the Internet exponentially increase, various search services are developed to help the users to locate relevant information. But they still exist some drawbacks such as the difficulty of mathematically modeling retrieval process, the lack of adaptivity and the indiscrimination of search. This paper shows how heterogeneous neural networks can be used in the design of an intelligent distributed information retrieval (DIR) system. In particular, three typical neural network models - Kohoren's SOFM Network, Hopfield Network, and Feed Forward Network with Back Propagation algorithm are introduced to overcome the above drawbacks in current research of DIR by using their unique properties. This preliminary investigation suggests that Neural Networks are useful tools for intelligent search for distributed information sources.

This article presents the performance evaluation of information retrieval system for English and Hindi cross-Indian languages. As India is a multilingual country, different varieties of data material in varieties of languages are increasing day by day on Internet database. And hence, multilingual information retrieval is big issue in country like India. Usually, people used their native dialect to represent their needs and communication, and hence, language diversity produces a great barricade. In this paper, a new research design of cross-lingual information retrieval system is proposed. Here, a new research design has been implemented for information retrieval based on English and Hindi cross-languages by applying an approach of query translation. English language is considered for the query language, and content is stored in the database in Hindi Language. Here, query translation from English language to Hindi language is done by using dictionary-based approach. Hindi WordNet is used for the query translation. Query expansion and query preprocessing methods are implemented to improve the performance of the new research design and accordingly get the good precision.KeywordsCLIRQuery translationInformation retrievalEnglish and Hindi languages

This SIGIR tutorial session on retrieval systems presents two experts in their field discussing two major types of retrieval systems. Gerard Salton will present his view of the automated information storage and retrieval system, i.e., a system which is designed to retrieve documents or document surrogates in response to the specific request of a user. He will emphasize file organization, content analysis and indexing, search strategies, and retrieval processes. On the other side of the retrieval fence, Ed Sibley will discuss Data Base Management Systems, with an emphasis on the data structures and interfaces utilized. Terminology, techniques, and problem areas will be discussed with the aim of (1) introducing newcomers to the subject areas, (2) giving the more experienced practitioners an up-to-date look at current technology, and (3) giving users and designers of each type of system insight into the types of techniques which are utilized in both familiar and unfamiliar situations, in order that they may be aided in solving their own retrieval problems.

It is the proposal of this paper that solutions to the problems of corporate planning can be improved by the use of suitable information storage, retrieval, and management systems.