Information Retrieval List Digest 079 (August 19, 1991) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-079 IRLIST Digest August 19, 1991 Volume VIII, Number 36 Issue 79 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. IJCAI-91: Airfares II. QUERIES B. Requests for Information 1. Introduction and Question about IAV, CD-I, and DVI III. JOB ANNOUNCEMETS 1. Undergraduate/Young Graduate Position IV. PROJECT WORK B. Bibliographies 1. IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. Fr: Kimberlee Pietrzak-Smith Re: IJCAI-91: Great Airfares! 12th INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (IJCAI-91) Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia August 24 - 30, 1991 There are presently extremely competitive airfares being offered between the United States and Australia. The following airlines are all offering special RETURN airfares between cities on the West Coat of the United States and Sydney for US$565.00. American Airlines Northwest Airlines Qantas United Airlines Conditions attached to these tickets include: - minimum stay 5 days - maximum stay 1 month NOTE: People wanting to take advantage of these extremely cheap tickets should do so soon since they are ONLY available until 15 July. ********************************************************** II. QUERIES II.B.1. Fr: Jay Kunz Re: Introduction and question about IAV, CD-I and DVI Hello, My name is Jay Kunz. I am a graduate student in Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. My interests include pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Education. I am especially interested in the application of interactive video (IAV), compact disc interactive (CD-I) and digital video interactive (DVI) to the teaching of foreign languages. I would appreciate any information about current, developing, or possible future applications of IAV, CD-I or DVI in foreign language programs. In particular, how would this technology be used to help teach foreign languages? Would it be a supplement to regular classroom activities, or a stand-alone program? What hardware/software would be used? Would certain aspects of a foreign language (such as grammar, culture, listening comprehension) be more appropriate for this type of technology? How would these applications relate to second language acquisition theory? I would be happy to post a summary of this information if there is enough interest. Thank you for your help! ********************************************************** III. JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS III.1. Fr: Marie C Hayet Re: Undergraduate/Young Graduate Position An undergraduate/young graduate placement in computational linguistics/natural language processing is available at the Universite Laval, Departement d'Informatique, Sainte-Foy, Quebec, Canada G1K 7P4 for a year or more. Within the framework of the ACAT [Acquisition des Connaissances et Analyse de Textes) project, the work focusses on the analysis of legal texts in English and knowledge acquisition, with a view to building a knowledge base. A similar system has already been developed for prescriptive texts in French. If you are interested in participating, please contact: Monsieur Bernard Moulin at the above address. Telephone: 1.418 656 5580 or 1.418 656 7979. Fax: 1.418 656 2324. Email: moulin@laval.vm1.bitnet Good supervision and human help system! ********************************************************** IV. PROJECT WORK IV.B.1. Fr: Susanne M. Humphrey Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being related to Information Retrieval (IR), resulting from a computer search, using BRS Information Technologies, of the Dissertation Abstracts Online database produced by University Microfilms International (UMI). Included are UMI order number, title, author, degree, year, institution; number of pages, one or more Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) subject descriptors chosen by the author, and abstract. Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor, MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska): 1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-268-6090. Price lists and other ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the published DAI. An alternate source for copies is sometimes provided. Dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their prior permission. AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGDX-90411. AU HASSAN, HANA ABBAS. TI GQUERY--A NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERY SYSTEM FOR GEOGRAPHICAL DATABASES. IN University of Sussex (United Kingdom) Ph.D. 1988, 321 pages. SO DAI V51(08), SecB, pp3936. DE Computer Science. Physical Geography. AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library. The development of computer hardware and software has now reached a point where queries to database systems can be entered in the style of a natural language. These queries are parsed by the computer and the requested information from the database is returned to the user. Such developments to database query languages are important since the time has come to pay more attention to the needs of the end-users who are often not computer specialists. They need to be able to use database query languages which are not based on a rigid formal syntax. This work describes the development of a database query language applicable to a geographical database, using a natural language-like interface for database query. The GQuery system allows "English language" access to a database of geographical information. The user can state a query in English and the system is capable of understanding and answering even comparatively complex queries. The system also provides the facility of correcting simple misspellings and includes comprehensive facilities for error detection and provides the facility of processing incomplete input (ellipsis). GQuery is based on the ideas of definite clause grammars and has been successfully implemented in Prolog. AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International ADG05-68975. AU LU, XIN. TI AN APPLICATION OF CASE RELATIONS TO DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL. IN The University of Western Ontario Ph.D. 1990. SO DAI V51(08), SecA, pp2552. DE Information Science. AB The purpose of this research is to design a document retrieval model which is a structural model based on case relations and to test how effectively a prototype of this model would perform retrieval on a test database. Case relations are a major component of case grammar proposed by linguistic theorists and developed in computational linguistics and natural language processing. The design of the structural retrieval model involves case relations and structured document representation, case relation-based natural language parsing and automatic structural indexing, and tree mapping and structural matching. In this model, a document is represented by a set of tree-like case frames in which the components of a natural language clause are assigned to different nodes called cases, and all nodes have pre-defined case relations to the verb of the clause. To implement such a structural representation by automatic means, an indexing engine was coded (using PROLOG) and developed which consists of a natural language parser and a case frame generator. In response to a natural language query, the prototype of the model: (1) processes and converts the query into a set of case frames; (2) measures the structural closeness between the query and every document in a database through tree-mapping; and (3) presents the retrieved documents, according to their closeness to the query, in ranked order. A number of typical retrieval experiments have been designed to compare the structural model with the vector space model and the Boolean model. All of the model prototypes processed a set of thirty queries on a test database of 534 documents. The retrieval performance was measured using recall-precision graphs, averaged recall and precision, and statistical tests. The experimental results showed that the effectiveness of the structural model was barely comparable to that of the other models. The conclusions are: (1) the structural model is not more effective than other models, and (2) replications of this study are needed to further prove or disprove the usefulness of case relations in improving retrieval effectiveness. AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGDX-91020. AU MARTIN, DAVID. TI ON THE REPRESENTATION OF SOCIOECONOMIC INFORMATION WITHIN GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS. IN University College, Cardiff (Wales) (United Kingdom) Ph.D. 1989, 384 pages. SO DAI V51(08), SecA, pp2553. DE Information Science. Geography. AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Recent years have seen a massive expansion in the availability and use of spatially referenced data. This trend has led to the development and widespread application of geographic information systems for the handling of such data. The evolution of these systems has been largely technology-led, and driven particularly by applications in the physical environment. A review is presented both of their development and of the techniques currently used for the representation of spatial phenomena. It is apparent from this work that the field is generally lacking a theoretical basis, and that the direct transfer of technology from physical to socio-economic applications may be inappropriate. Drawing on an existing model of the cartographic process, a theoretical framework is constructed which focusses on the transformations through which spatial data may pass during their passage through the information system, and which identifies the importance of spatial object class transformations to the accuracy of the digital data model. Using this framework, the unique characteristics of socio-economic data are illustrated, with reference to the well-known ecological fallacy and modifiable areal unit problem. It is suggested that the most appropriate method for the representation of such data is as a surface model. A technique is developed for the construction of socio-economic surfaces from population-weighted centroid data, such as that available from the UK Census of Population, or postcode directories. The method uses a variable kernel estimator to distribute each centroid's population into the surrounding region, preserving both unpopulated regions within the data plane, and the total volume under the surface. The technique is implemented in a series of specially written programs, and its considerable potential is illustrated by applications to simulated data and to a study area in South Wales. AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International ADG05-68992. AU WOLFRAM, DIETMAR. TI THE APPLICATION OF INFORMETRICS TO INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS DESIGN: A SIMULATION STUDY. IN The University of Western Ontario Ph.D. 1990. SO DAI V51(08), SecA, pp2553. DE Information Science. AB The efficient design and maintenance of information retrieval systems are still important considerations, even with the current availability of faster computer hardware and cheaper secondary storage. Informetrics, the quantitative study of information and its use, could provide the systems designer and analyst with tools with which to aid in decision making for optimising system performance. This study examines how informetrics can be used to help the systems designer in deciding what types of file structures would provide the best performance for a given type of information system environment. It is hypothesized that for varying index term distributions and system term usage patterns, different file structures provide more timely access and require less space. A factorial design simulation study was carried out to examine the retrieval performance and space requirements of several types of hypothetical information retrieval systems. Performance estimates were based on simulation runs varying system parameters which included the index term distribution, the term selection relationship and number of index terms. Results under different file structures were compared using multi-way Analysis of Variance. It was found that different structures were better suited for different retrieval environments. The chained hashing structure, in most cases, provided the best retrieval performance and most economical space requirements where gradually decreasing term distributions were present. However, the proposed modified hashing structure performed better in situations where steep term distributions existed. Two variations of the BIM-tree (Balanced Implicit Multiway tree) also provided good performance where steep term distributions were encountered and where the term selection relationship favoured the retrieval of terms with larger postings lists. ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. 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