 An expert system for automatic query reformationSusan Gauch and John B. Smith Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1993, vol. 44, issue 3, 124-136 Abstract: Unfamiliarity with search tactics creates difficulties for many users of online retrieval systems. User observations indicate that even experienced searchers use vocabulary incorrectly and rarely reformulate their queries. To address these problems, an expert system for online search assistance was developed. This prototype automatically reformulates queries to improve the search results, and ranks the retrieved passages to speed the identification of relevant information. Users' search performance using the expert system was compared with their search performance on their own, and their search performance using an online thesaurus. The following conclusions were reached: (1) The expert system significantly reduced the number of queries necessary to find relevant passages compared with the user searching alone or with the thesaurus. (2) The expert system produced marginally significant improvements in precision compared with the user searching on their own. There was no significant difference in the recall achieved by the three system configurations. (3) Overall, the expert system ranked relevant passages above irrelevant passages. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Date: 1993 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:44:y:1993:i:3:p:124-136 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science from Association for Information Science & Technology |
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