ANNOD: a navigator of natural-language organized (textual) data

  • Authors:
  • Robert E. Williamson

  • Affiliations:
  • Knowledge Systems, Inc., 12 E. Melrose St., Chevy Chase, MD, and Information Technology Branch, LHNCBC National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '85 Proceedings of the 8th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 1985

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

ANNOD is the name of a system developed at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which implements a set of linguistic and empirical techniques that permit retrieval of natural language information in response to natural language queries. The system is based on Dr. Gerard Salton's SMART [1] document retrieval system and is presently implemented on a mini-computer as part of an Interactive TExt Management System, ITEMS.[2] Actual experience with retrieval of information from NLM's Hepatitis Knowledge Base (HKB), an encyclopedic hierarchical, full-text file, is presented. The techniques used in ANNOD include: automatic stemming of words, common word deletion, thesaurus expansion, a complex empirical matching (ranking) algorithm (similarity measure), and techniques expressly designed to permit rapid response in a mini-computer environment. Preliminary testing demonstrates high efficiency in identifying portions of a text which are relevant to users.