Executive SummaryThe database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda --broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web.
The SMART automatic document retrieval system is used to study association procedures for automatic content analysis. The effect of word frequency and other parameters on the association process is investigated through examination of related pairs and through retrieval experiments. Associated pairs of words usually reflect localized word meanings, and true synonyms cannot readily be found from first or second order relationships in our document collections. There is little overlap between word relationships found through associations and those used in thesaurus construction, and the effects of word associations and a thesaurus in retrieval are independent. The use of associations in retrieval experiments improves not only recall, by permitting new matches between requests and documents, but also precision, by reinforcing existing matches. In our experiments, the precision effect is responsible for most of the improvement possible with associations. A properly constructed thesaurus, however, offers better performance than statistical association methods.
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