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Article
Publication date: 1 April 1965

HELEN L. BROWNSON

Interest in the objective testing and evaluation of document searching systems and procedures has grown steadily during the past decade. The reason for such interest is perhaps…

56

Abstract

Interest in the objective testing and evaluation of document searching systems and procedures has grown steadily during the past decade. The reason for such interest is perhaps obvious: a great deal of attention has been, and is being, given to the development of new methods, including mechanized methods, for storing and searching characterizations of scientific and technical documents. To determine the effectiveness and utility of these new methods, particularly in comparison with the more conventional methods still in use, we need objective means of assessing their performance. Although some progress has been made, much remains to be done on the development of evaluation methods and criteria, a high priority area of study in the view of many individuals and organizations.

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Journal of Documentation, vol. 21 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

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Article
Publication date: 1 December 1963

ALAN M. REES

It is indeed a pleasure to talk to you this evening about information retrieval in general and at the Center for Documentation in particular. Information retrieval, I suspect, is…

43

Abstract

It is indeed a pleasure to talk to you this evening about information retrieval in general and at the Center for Documentation in particular. Information retrieval, I suspect, is treated with some suspicion in Britain, and much of the outpouring of documentation literature is doubtless discounted as typical American excesses of enthusiasm and braggadocio. I hope that I can contribute something tonight towards putting our own efforts into a sensible perspective.

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 15 no. 12
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 April 1963

CYRIL W. CLEVERDON and J. MILLS

The evaluation of information retrieval systems has recently become an important matter. In the past, however, most reports or proposals on this type of work appear largely to…

147

Abstract

The evaluation of information retrieval systems has recently become an important matter. In the past, however, most reports or proposals on this type of work appear largely to have ignored the efficiency of operation of the central core of an IR system, namely those operations concerned in the compilation and use of the index. The only aspects to receive consideration are the physical form of the index and the design of thesauri or classifications. The former activity has been slanted towards the use of computers and has tended to assume that this type of equipment will, ipso facto, give an improved performance but has made no attempt to justify cost factors which may be one hundred times that of conventional techniques. Work on thesauri and classifications, where it has been practical in nature, appears to consist of compiling lists of terms which go out of favour as quickly as any list of subject headings in the past; the more popular theoretical approach is the setting up of models or the use of increasingly abstruse and complex algebras. From the results and conclusions of the experimental work at Cranfield, it would seem that many of these investigations are comparatively trivial.

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 15 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 February 1964

J. MILLS

Librarianship and documentation is a service industry. Its end product is the receipt by a customer of the information retrieved for him, from a store, by the librarian, whether…

42

Abstract

Librarianship and documentation is a service industry. Its end product is the receipt by a customer of the information retrieved for him, from a store, by the librarian, whether this service is effected indirectly (by the mere placing of the item in some convenient spot in the library, the customer helping himself) or by direct provision of a reference to a document or the document itself. So our continuing preoccupation with IR is natural enough.

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 16 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 1962

Publication of the Aslib Year Book is to be discontinued. A full and up‐to‐date list of Aslib members will be published in 1963.

13

Abstract

Publication of the Aslib Year Book is to be discontinued. A full and up‐to‐date list of Aslib members will be published in 1963.

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 14 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 March 1981

BRIAN E. LANTZ

The nature and relative merits of two measures of information retrieval system effectiveness, documents read and relevant references retrieved, are discussed. Using data on 2,380…

383

Abstract

The nature and relative merits of two measures of information retrieval system effectiveness, documents read and relevant references retrieved, are discussed. Using data on 2,380 searches completed at London University's Central Information Service, the author presents a mathematical model for the relationship between these two variables. Data suggest that this is best modelled by a monotonically asymptotic function, i.e. by a function increasing to a limit. A negative exponential function provides the best fit to the data, though a simpler hyperbolic function also provides a good fit. The suggested relationship between documents read and relevant references retrieved is further confirmed when the data is analysed by subject area of the user group. The major distinction between groups was the limiting value for mean number of documents read. Medical scientists read considerably more than the average, while engineers read considerably less. Biological, physical and social scientists were indistinguishable from the population as a whole within the statistical limitations of the data. Potential areas for further research are suggested.

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Journal of Documentation, vol. 37 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

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Article
Publication date: 1 April 1990

Donna Harman and Gerald Candela

In February Online Review published a Letter to the Editor from Cyril Cleverdon. This letter was written in response to Roger Summit's paper ‘In search of the elusive end user’…

40

Abstract

In February Online Review published a Letter to the Editor from Cyril Cleverdon. This letter was written in response to Roger Summit's paper ‘In search of the elusive end user’, which was presented at the Eusidic Conference in October 1989 and published in Online Review in December. Mr Cleverdon drew particular attention to the results of tests showing the practical feasibility of statistical ranking techniques reported by Harman and Candela in a soon to be published paper. This is a summary of that paper, the complete version of which will be published in October 1990 as ‘Retrieving records from a gigabyte of text on a minicomputer using statistical ranking’, in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science.

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Online Review, vol. 14 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0309-314X

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Article
Publication date: 1 March 1971

JOHN BLAGDEN

The first point that I would like to make about the differences between a structured and unstructured vocabulary is that the question is very much related to vocabulary size and…

42

Abstract

The first point that I would like to make about the differences between a structured and unstructured vocabulary is that the question is very much related to vocabulary size and this has certainly in the past generated a good deal of controversy in Aslib co‐ordinate indexing circles. Mr Snel and Mr Boyd have been two of the leading advocates of a restricted vocabulary and they argue that this keeps both indexing and searching simple. They also argue that it allows for human intelligence to play a much bigger part in the search process by allowing the sifting of search output to be done by the inquirer and not the system. It is also assumed, probably correctly, that the bigger the vocabulary the more noise a system will produce. The reason that I believe that the question of structured vocabularies and vocabulary's size are related is simply that if one does employ structure, i.e. a classificatory element of some sort, then the practical result of this is a bigger vocabulary. May I interject with a quotation from Cyril Cleverdon, who, to my way of thinking, summed up the question of vocabulary size in a conference that the Co‐ordinate Indexing Group organized some considerable while ago: ‘Much of the disagreement has been due to the fact that speakers were arguing from different view points. If it was found that a particular system operated satisfactorily for a certain organization, then obviously there was no need to find fault with it. However, it was unjustifiable to make claim as speakers had done that the same system would necessarily operate satisfactorily in all other situations. There were obvious differences when one organization was more interested in having a good recall ratio and was relatively unconcerned about relevance, whilst another organization was more interested in having a good relevance ratio. Certain indexing devices were available which could bring about either of these situations but it was unlikely that any of the operating systems discussed would satisfactorily meet both requirements.’

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 23 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 1967

CYRIL CLEVERDON

The investigation dealt with the effect which different devices have on the performance of index languages. It appeared that the most important consideration was the specificity…

725

Abstract

The investigation dealt with the effect which different devices have on the performance of index languages. It appeared that the most important consideration was the specificity of the index terms; within the context of the conditions existing in this test, single‐word terms were more effective than concept terms or a controlled vocabulary.

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Aslib Proceedings, vol. 19 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0001-253X

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Article
Publication date: 1 February 1964

BARBARA R.F. KYLE

Many of us feel that as a result of the Cranfield experiments we ought perhaps to know something that we didn't know before and that this knowledge ought to have some positive…

80

Abstract

Many of us feel that as a result of the Cranfield experiments we ought perhaps to know something that we didn't know before and that this knowledge ought to have some positive effects on our work—the difficulty is to be sure exactly what these effects should be and what we ought to be doing about it, other than acquiring guilt feelings. During the period of the Cranfield experiments I myself have also been engaged, on a less impressive scale, with similar problems in different fields of knowledge.

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Journal of Documentation, vol. 20 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

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