Alleviating Search Uncertainty through Concept Associations: Automatic Indexing, Co-Occurrence Analysis, and Parallel Computing

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona === In this article, we report research on an algorithmic approach to alleviating search uncertainty in a large information space. Grounded on object filtering, automatic indexing, and co-occurrence analysis, we performed a large-...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Hsinchun, Martinez, Joanne, Kirchhoff, Amy, Ng, Tobun Dorbin, Schatz, Bruce R.
Language:en
Published: Wiley Periodicals, Inc 1998
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Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10150/106252
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Summary:Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona === In this article, we report research on an algorithmic approach to alleviating search uncertainty in a large information space. Grounded on object filtering, automatic indexing, and co-occurrence analysis, we performed a large-scale experiment using a parallel supercomputer (SGI Power Challenge) to analyze 400,000/ abstracts in an INSPEC computer engineering collection. Two system-generated thesauri, one based on a combined object filtering and automatic indexing method, and the other based on automatic indexing only, were compared with the human-generated INSPEC subject thesaurus. Our user evaluation revealed that the system-generated thesauri were better than the INSPEC thesaurus in concept recall, but in concept precision the 3 thesauri were comparable. Our analysis also revealed that the terms suggested by the 3 thesauri were complementary and could be used to significantly increase â â varietyâ â in search terms and thereby reduce search uncertainty.