Innovations in Discovery Systems: User Studies and the Bento Approach

Over the past 30 years, library discovery services have evolved through expanded OPACs, federated search systems employing broadcast searching; Web-scale discovery systems (WSDS) that aggregate metadata and full-text content into a single integrated index; and, currently, hybrid bento-style systems that use federated techniques over WSDS, OPACs, and local information content. The bento systems partition search results into separate zoned screen displays grouped by content format type and/or local service results. Recent studies on Web-scale discovery systems have identified a number of user access issues centering on problems with blended result displays, problematical relevancy rankings of search results, full-text search problems, and the inability of WSDS to adequately provide access to local library services and resources. The concept of “full library discovery,” a phrase first coined by Lorcan Dempsey, has been introduced to refer to discovery approaches that move beyond the retrieval of collection materials to also include local information services and local content and links. The bento-based systems are an attempt to address the identified problems with WSDS and also provide discovery services that address user needs, in particular known item search and streamlined full-text access. This presentation will provide an analysis of the 38 libraries presently employing the bento approach and will look at identified user needs and search behaviors, as revealed in detailed search and clickthrough transaction log analyses. There is a clear need for an evidence-based analysis of user search behaviors in retrieval environments characterized by access to distributed information resources

Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure

Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operating within a discourse segment should be abandoned in order to integrate centering with a model of global discourse structure. The within-segment restriction causes three problems. The first problem is that centers are often continued over discourse segment boundaries with pronominal referring expressions whose form is identical to those that occur within a discourse segment. The second problem is that recent work has shown that listeners perceive segment boundaries at various levels of granularity. If centering models a universal processing phenomenon, it is implausible that each listener is using a different centering algorithm.The third issue is that even for utterances within a discourse segment, there are strong contrasts between utterances whose adjacent utterance within a segment is hierarchically recent and those whose adjacent utterance within a segment is linearly recent. This chapter argues that these problems can be eliminated by replacing Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state with an alternate model, the cache model. I show how the cache model is easily integrated with the centering algorithm, and provide several types of data from naturally occurring discourses that support the proposed integrated model. Future work should provide additional support for these claims with an examination of a larger corpus of naturally occurring discourses.Comment: 35 pages, uses elsart12, lingmacros, named, psfi

Desiderata for an Every Citizen Interface to the National Information Infrastructure: Challenges for NLP

In this paper, I provide desiderata for an interface that would enable ordinary people to properly access the capabilities of the NII. I identify some of the technologies that will be needed to achieve these desiderata, and discuss current and future research directions that could lead to the development of such technologies. In particular, I focus on the ways in which theory and techniques from natural language processing could contribute to future interfaces to the NII. Introduction The evolving national information infrastructure (NII) has made available a vast array of on-line services and networked information resources in a variety of forms (text, speech, graphics, images, video). At the same time, advances in computing and telecommunications technology have made it possible for an increasing number of households to own (or lease or use) powerful personal computers that are connected to this resource. Accompanying this progress is the expectation that people will be able to more..