SIGIR ¿94

The book provides comprehensive coverage of the broad range of techniques that make up an effective text-based information system, particularly in the areas of categorisation and routing. These tasks - although related to traditional information retrieval and using many of the same techniques - are different in some crucial aspects, and this has led to a variety of interesting and exciting new research.

Information retrieval (IR) is becoming an increasingly important area as scientific, business and government organisations take up the notion of "information superhighways" and make available their full text databases for searching. Containing a selection of 35 papers taken from the 17th Annual SIGIR Conference held in Dublin, Ireland in July 1994, the book addresses basic research and provides an evaluation of information retrieval techniques in applications. Topics covered include text categorisation, indexing, user modelling, IR theory and logic, natural language processing, statistical and probabilistic models of information retrieval systems, routing, passage retrieval, and implementation issues.

The book provides comprehensive coverage of the broad range of techniques that make up an effective text-based information system, particularly in the areas of categorisation and routing. These tasks - although related to traditional information retrieval and using many of the same techniques - are different in some crucial aspects, and this has led to a variety of interesting and exciting new research.

Text Categorisation.- A Sequential Algorithm for Training Text Classifiers.- Expert Network: Effective and Efficient Learning from Human Decisions in Text Categorization and Retrieval.- Towards Language Independent Automated Learning of Text Categorisation Methods.- Using IR Techniques for Text Classification in Document Analysis.- Indexing.- An Evaluation Method for Stemming Algorithms.- On the Measurement of Inter-Linker Consistency and Retrieval Effectiveness in Hypertext Databases.- Query Expansion Using Lexical-Semantic Relations.- User Modelling.- Perceptual Speed, Learning and Information Retrieval Performance.- Term Relevance Feedback and Query Expansion: Relation to Design.- Modelling Information Retrieval Agents with Belief Revision.- Polyrepresentation of Information Needs and Semantic Entities: Elements of a Cognitive Theory for Information Retrieval Interaction.- Theory and Logic.- Investigating Aboutness Axioms using Information Fields.- A Probabilistic Terminological Logic for Modelling Information Retrieval.- Natural Language Processing.- Retrieving Terms and their Variants in a Lexicalised Unification-Based Framework.- Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval.- A Full-Text Retrieval System with a Dynamic Abstract Generation Function.- Statistical Models.- A Document Retrieval Model Based on Term Frequency Ranks.- Automatic Combination of Multiple Ranked Retrieval Systems.- Properties of Extended Boolean Models in Information Retrieval.- Performance Evaluation.- OHSUMED: An Interactive Retrieval Evaluation and New Large Test Collection for Research.- Results of Applying Probabilistic IR to OCR Text.- Natural Language vs. Boolean Query Evaluation: A Comparison of Retrieval Performance.- Probabilistic Models.- Inferring Probability of Relevance Using the Method of Logistic Regression.- Some Simple Effective Approximations to the 2-Poisson Model for Probabilistic Weighted Retrieval.- Triennial ACM-SIGIR award paper: The Formalism of Probability Theory in IR: A Foundation for An Encumbrance?.- Interfaces.- LyberWorld - A Visualization User Interface Supporting Fulltext Retrieval.- A System for Discovering Relationships by Feature Extraction from Text Databases.- Routing.- Information Filtering Based on User Behaviour Analysis and Best Match Text Retrieval.- Improving Text Retrieval for the Routing Problem using Latent Semantic Indexing.- The Effect of Adding Relevance Information in a Relevance Feedback Environment.- Passage Retrieval.- Passage-Level Evidence in Document Retrieval.- Effective Retrieval of Structured Documents.- Document and Passage Retrieval Based on Hidden Markov Models.- Implementation.- Synthetic Workload Performance Analysis of Incremental Updates.- Document Filtering for Fast Ranking.- Adapting a Full-text Information Retrieval System to the Computer Troubleshooting Domain.- Panel Sessions.- Integration of Information Retrieval and Database Systems.- Evaluating Interactive Retrieval Systems.- Author Index.