MONO91 Other Potentially Related Research chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards "Thus we see that the automatic elaboration of a request does, in fact, catch rele- vant documents that were not retrieved by the original request." 1/ 6.4.2 Natural Language Text Searching - Swanbon The work in automatic indexing and related research directed by Swanson at Ramo Wooldridge Corporation has included "indexing at the time of search" in natural language text searching, (1960 [582, 587], 1963 [583]), the previously mentioned studies of machine-like indexing by people (Montgomery and Swanson, 1962 [421]), and automatic assignment indexing using pre-selected lists of clue words, (Swanson, 1963 [580]). The last of these three major areas of investigation is the one of the greatest interest in this present study, but the earlier experiments in machine searching of natural language texts warrant some discussion. In his reports on this text searching project, Swanson has specifically claimed that the methods for transforming search questions can serve as the basis for an automatic indexing method. Thus: "...A technique for automatic indexing can be derived immediately from a text searching technique... it is necessary only to so organize the machine procedures that those operations of text reduction or reorganization common to all searches are performed only once and prior to searching in order to create directly an automatic indexing procedure." 2/ Swanson has also claimed that if automatic searching of full text is not feasible, then automatic indexing is not feasible, the one being prerequisite to the other. For example: "Clearly, if a computer technique for search and retrieval from the full text of a collection of documents cannot be developed, then it is unthinkable that matters could be improved by using the machine to operate on just part of the information (a `condensed representation[OCRerr]) -- that is, on an automatically produced index. This line of argument demonstrates persuasively that the development of techniques for automatic full-text search and retrieval is a prerequisite to automatic indexing. It is equally clear that a technique for automatic indexing can be derived immediately from a text-searching tech- nique, and thus that the two processes involve conceptually equivalent problems." 3/ In the actual text searching experiments, a model "library" consisting of 100 short articles in the field of nuclear physics was set up in machine-usable form. These articles were also studied by subject specialists who rated the relevance of each paper to each of 50 questions, and assigned weighting factors representing the degree of judged relevance. A second group of people, who knew only that the papers were in the field of nuclear 1/ 2/ 3/ Swanson, 1960 [582], p. 6. Ibid, p. 240. Swanson, 1960 [587], p. 1100. 134