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In a document retrieval, or other pattern matching environment where stored entities (documents) are compared with each other or with incoming patterns (search requests), it appears that the best indexing (property) space is one where each entity lies as far away from the others as possible; in these circumstances the value of an indexing system may be expressible as a function of the density of the object space; in particular, retrieval performance may correlate inversely with space density. An approach based on space density computations is used to choose an optimum indexing vocabulary for a collection of documents. Typical evaluation results are shown, demonstating the usefulness of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report contains recommendations on a sample course curriculum in the general area of information organization and information system design in a Ph.D. Computer Science Program. The subject area is first briefly described, followed by a listing of some desirable graduate-level courses. Suitable bibliographies are appended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic information retrieval programs require the manipulation of a variety of different data structures, including linear text, sparse matrices, and tree or list structures. The main data manipulations to be performed in automatic information systems are first briefly reviewed. A variety of data representations which have been used to describe structured information are then examined, and the characteristics of various processing languages are outlined in the light of the procedures requiring implementation. Advantages and disadvantages of these programming languages for the retrieval application are examined, and suggestions are made for the design of programming facilities to aid in information retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes a fully-automatic document retrieval system operating on the IBM 7094. Characteristics of the system; Availability of efficient methods to analyze documents and search requests; Use of the feature in the retrieval process; Use of the system in testing the effectiveness of the various available processing methods.

Presents an introduction to the December 1968 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM."

Discusses the editor's view on the politics of science and technology with reference to the relationship between the United States and a number of other countries. Reflection on the areas of principal concern, and the scientific achievements in Europe and elsewhere; Role played by computers and computer science in this situation; Crisis in the field of computer science in European countries; Shortcomings and failures of the European computer industry; Existence of a computer gap between the U.S. and a number of other countries.

The article presents the periodical's editorial policy of publishing articles related to programming language development, compiler management and construction, numerical methods, and computer algorithms.

The performance of information retrieval systems can be evaluated in a number of different ways. Much of the published evaluation work is based on measuring the retrieval performance of an average user query. Unfortunately, formal proofs are difficult to construct for the average case. In the present study, retrieval evaluation is based on optimizing the performance of a specific user query. The concept of query term accuracy is introduced as the probability of occurrence of a query term in the documents relevant to that query. By relating term accuracy to the frequency of occurrence of the term in the documents of a collection it is possible to give formal proofs of the effectiveness with respect to a given user query of a number of automatic indexing systems that have been used successfully in experimental situations. Among these are inverse document frequency weighting, thesaurus construction, and phrase generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]