Redesigning the university library in the digital ageT.D. Wilson
doi: 10.1108/EUM0000000007159pmid: N/A
Business process re‐engineering (or redesign) has achieved mixed results in business and industry but it offers an approach to thinking about the future of academic libraries in the digital age that is worth considering. This paper outlines the forces that are currently affecting academic libraries in the UK and proposes a strategy whereby the transformation from the handling of artefacts to the handling of electronic sources may be effected with maximum benefit to the information user.
In search of the unknown user: indexing, hypertext and the world wide webDavid Ellis; Nigel Ford; Jonathan Furner
doi: 10.1108/EUM0000000007160pmid: N/A
For the purposes of this article, the indexing of information is interpreted as the pre‐processing of information in order to enable its retrieval. This definition thus spans a dimension extending from classification‐based approaches (pre‐co‐ordinate) to keyword searching (post‐co‐ordinate). In the first section we clarify our use of terminology, by briefly describing a framework for modelling IR systems in terms of sets of objects, relationships and functions. In the following three sections, we discuss the application of indexing functions to document collections of three specific types: (1) ‘conventional’ text databases; (2) hypertext databases; and (3) the World Wide Web, globally distributed across the Internet.
Applications of n ‐grams in textual information systemsAlexander M. Robertson; Peter Willett
doi: 10.1108/EUM0000000007161pmid: N/A
This paper provides an introduction to the use of n ‐grams in textual information systems, where an n‐gram is a string of n , usually adjacent, characters extracted from a section of continuous text. Applications that can be implemented efficiently and effectively using sets of n ‐grams include spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval with serial, inverted and signature files, dictionary look‐up, text compression, and language identification.
Information extraction: beyond document retrievalRobert Gaizauskas; Yorick Wilks
doi: 10.1108/EUM0000000007162pmid: N/A
In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a pre‐specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured representations called templates. Here we describe the nature of the IE task, review the history of the area from its origins in AI work in the 1960s and 70s till the present, discuss the techniques being used to carry out the task, describe application areas where IE systems are or are about to be at work, and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing the area. What emerges is a picture of an exciting new text processing technology with a host of new applications, both on its own and in conjunction with other technologies, such as information retrieval, machine translation and data mining.
Chemical patents and structural information ‐ the Sheffield research in contextdoi: 10.1108/EUM0000000007163pmid: N/A
This paper focuses on the importance of chemical patents as an information source. After an outline of this importance, the discussion concentrates principally on the area of structural information, highlighting some of the special characteristics that are found in the generic (Markush) type of description, in order to place in context some of the research work at Sheffield University. A brief summary is given of the important highlights of the research, performed by a team headed by Professor Mike Lynch from 1979 to 1995.