This paper presents a morphological classification of languages from the IR perspective. Linguistic typology research has shown that the morphological complexity of every language in the world can be described by two variables, index of synthesis and index of fusion. These variables provide a...

The increasing flood of documentary information through the Internet and other information sources challenges the developers of information retrieval systems. It is not enough that an IR system is able to make a distinction between relevant and non‐relevant documents. The reduction of...

This paper presents an approach for performing knowledge discovery in texts through qualitative and quantitative analyses of high‐level textual characteristics. Instead of applying mining techniques on attribute values, terms or keywords extracted from texts, the discovery process works over...

An empirical investigation of the consistency of retrieval through Internet search engines is reported. Thirteen engines are evaluated: AltaVista, EuroFerret, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, MSN, NorthernLight, Snap, WebCrawler and three national Dutch engines: Ilse, Search.nl and Vindex. The...

This article investigates how consistent different newspapers are in their choice of words when writing about the same news events. News articles on the same news events were taken from three Finnish newspapers and compared in regard to their central concepts and words representing the concepts...

Books include novels, dictionaries, telephone books, textbooks, anthologies, instruction manuals, proceedings of meetings and directories. The phrase “electronic books” has been applied to some types of CD‐ROM systems, palm‐top CD players, on‐demand text, electronic document systems of...

This paper provides an introduction to the use of n ‐grams in textual information systems, where an n‐gram is a string of n , usually adjacent, characters extracted from a section of continuous text. Applications that can be implemented efficiently and effectively using sets of n ‐grams...

In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a pre‐specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured...

This article characterises the questioning behaviour in reference interviews preceding delegated online searches of bibliographic databases and relates it to questioning behaviour in other types of interviews/settings. With one exception, the unit of analysis is the question (N=610), not the...

In order to compare the value of subject descriptors and title keywords as entries to subject searches, two studies were carried out. Both studies concentrated on monographs in the humanities and social sciences, held by the online public access catalogue of the National Library of the...