Lexical cohesion and term proximity in document ranking

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We demonstrate effective new methods of document ranking based on lexical cohesive relationships between query terms. The proposed methods rely solely on the lexical relationships between original query terms, and do not involve query expansion or relevance feedback. Two types of lexical cohesive relationship information between query terms are used in document ranking: short-distance collocation relationship between query terms, and long-distance relationship, determined by the collocation of query terms with other words. The methods are evaluated on TREC corpora, and show improvements over baseline systems. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The nature of information science: changing models

Introduction. This paper considers the nature of information science as a discipline and profession. Method. It is based on conceptual analysis of the information science literature, and consideration of philosophical perspectives, particularly those of Kuhn and Peirce. Results. It is argued that information science may be understood as a field of study, with human recorded information as its concern, focusing on the components of the information chain, studied through the perspective of domain analysis, in specific or general contexts. A particular aspect of interest is those aspects of information organization, and of human information-related behaviour, which are invariant to changes in technology. Information science can also be seen as a science of evaluation of information, understood as semantic content with respect to qualitative growth of knowledge and change in knowledge structures in domains. Conclusions. This study contributes to the understanding of the unique 'academic territory' of information science, a discipline with an identity distinct from adjoining subjects

Query expansion with terms selected using lexical cohesion analysis of documents

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We present new methods of query expansion using terms that form lexical cohesive links between the contexts of distinct query terms in documents (i.e., words surrounding the query terms in text). The link-forming terms (link-terms) and short snippets of text surrounding them are evaluated in both interactive and automatic query expansion (QE). We explore the effectiveness of snippets in providing context in interactive query expansion, compare query expansion from snippets vs. whole documents, and query expansion following snippet selection vs. full document relevance judgements. The evaluation, conducted on the HARD track data of TREC 2005, suggests that there are considerable advantages in using link-terms and their surrounding short text snippets in QE compared to terms selected from full-texts of documents. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Information arts and information science: Time to unite?

This article explicates the common ground between two currently independent fields of Inquiry, namely information arts and information science, and suggests a frame-work that could unite them as a single field of study. The article defines and clarifies the meaning of information art and presents an axiological framework that could be used to judge the value of works of information art. The axiological framework is applied to examples of works of information art to demonstrate its use. The article argues that both Information arts and Information science could be studied under a common framework; namely, the domain-analytic or sociocognitive approach. It also is argued that the unification of the two fields could help enhance the meaning and scope of both information science and information arts and therefore be beneficial to both fields

Situating logic and information in information science

Information Science (IS) is commonly said to study collection, classification, storage, retrieval, and use of information. However, there is no consensus on what information is. This article examines some of the formal models of information and informational processes, namely, Situation Theory and Shannon's Information Theory, in terms of their suitability for providing a useful framework for studying information in IS. It is argued that formal models of information are concerned with mainly ontological aspects of information, whereas IS, because of its evaluative role with respect to semantic content, needs an epistemological conception of information. It is argued from this perspective that concepts of epistemological/aesthetic/ethical information are plausible, and that information science needs to rise to the challenge of studying many different conceptions of information embedded in different contexts. This goal requires exploration of a wide variety of tools from philosophy and logic. © 2009 ASIS&T

Need for a systemic theory of classification in information science

In the article, the author aims to clarify some of the issues surrounding the discussion regarding the usefulness of a substantive classification theory in information science (IS) by means of a broad perspective. By utilizing a concrete example from the High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track of a Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), the author suggests that the "bag of words" approach to information retrieval (IR) and techniques such as relevance feedback have significant limitations in expressing and resolving complex user information needs. He argues that a comprehensive analysis of information needs involves explicating often-implicit assumptions made by the authors of scholarly documents, as well as everyday texts such as news articles. He also argues that progress in IS can be furthered by developing general theories that are applicable to multiple domains. The concrete example of application of the domain-analytic approach to subject analysis in IS to the aesthetic evaluation of works of information arts is used to support this argument

On Document Relevance and Lexical Cohesion between Query Terms

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexical-semantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. In this paper we empirically investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms' occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Lexical cohesion between distinct query terms in a document is estimated on the basis of the lexical-semantic relations (repetition, synonymy, hyponymy and sibling) that exist between there collocates - words that co-occur with them in the same windows of text. Experiments suggest significant differences between the lexical cohesion in relevant and non-relevant document sets exist. A document ranking method based on lexical cohesion shows some performance improvements. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Identifying relationships between entities in text for complex interactive question answering task

[No abstract available

The nature of information science: Changing models

Introduction. This paper considers the nature of information science as a discipline and profession. Method. It is based on conceptual analysis of the information science literature, and consideration of philosophical perspectives, particularly those of Kuhn and Peirce. Results. It is argued that information science may be understood as a field of study, with human recorded information as its concern, focusing on the components of the information chain, studied through the perspective of domain analysis, in specific or general contexts. A particular aspect of interest is those aspects of information organization, and of human information-related behaviour, which are invariant to changes in technology. Information science can also be seen as a science of evaluation of information, understood as semantic content with respect to qualitative growth of knowledge and change in knowledge structures in domains. Conclusions. This study contributes to the understanding of the unique 'academic territory' of information science, a discipline with an identity distinct from adjoining subjects

A graph based approach to estimating lexical cohesion

Traditionally, information retrieval systems rank documents according to the query terms they contain. However, even if a document may contain all query terms, this does not guarantee that it is relevant to the query. The query terms can occur together in the same document, but may have been used in different contexts, expressing separate topics. Lexical cohesion is a characteristic of natural language texts, which can be used to determine whether the query terms are used in the same context in the document. In this paper we make use of a graph-based approach to capture term contexts and estimate the level of lexical cohesion in a document. To evaluate the performance of our system, we compare it against two benchmark systems using three TREC document collections. Copyright 2008 ACM