This article concerns the problem of how to permit a patron to represent the relative importance of various index terms in a Boolean request while retaining the desirable properties of a Boolean system. The character of classicalBoolean systems is reviewed and related to the notion of fuzzy sets. The fuzzy set concept then forms the basis of the concept of a fuzzy request in which weights are assigned to index terms. The properties of such a system are discussed, and it is shown that such systems retain the manipulability of traditional Boolean requests.
This article is the first of a two-part series on the informetric distributions, a family of regularities found to describe a wide range of phenomena both within and outside of the information sciences. This article introduces the basic forms these regularities take. A model is proposed that makes plausible the possibility that, in spite of marked differences in their appearance, these distributions are variants of a single distribution; heuristic arguments are then given that this is indeed the case. That a single distribution should describe such a wide range of phenomena, often in areas where the existence of any simple description is surprising, suggests that one should look for explanations not in terms of causal models, but in terms of the properties of the single informetric distribution. Some of the consequences of this conclusion are broached in this article, and explored more carefully in Part II.
The fundamental problem of information retrieval is how to decide, on the basis of clues, each of which is an imperfect indicator of docuemnt relevance, which documents to retrieve and the order in which to present them. The most satisfying conceptual approaches have been based on probabilistic decision theoretic models. However, those previously used make a decision about a single document at a time, and extend this to retreiv e multiple docuemnts by ignoring interdocument interaction. The purpose of the articles is to present decision‐theoretic models which intrinsically include the multiple retrieval case. In particular, we argue that information retrieval should be envisioned as a process, in which the information retrieval system responds to a request by presenting documents to the patron in a sequence, gathering feedback as the process proceeds, and using this information to modify future retrieval. A retrieval strategy that naturally results from this model is described. Two examples are examined in detail.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.