Search (1 results, page 1 of 1)

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Content

"Most Web search engines accept natural language queries, perform some kind of fuzzy matching and produce ranked output, displaying first the documents that are most likely to be relevant. On the other hand, most library online public access catalogs (OPACs) an the Web are still Boolean retrieval systems that perform exact matching, and require users to express their search requests precisely in a Boolean search language and to refine their search statements to improve the search results. It is well-documented that users have difficulty searching Boolean OPACs effectively (e.g. Borgman, 1996; Ensor, 1992; Wallace, 1993). One approach to making OPACs easier to use is to develop a natural language search interface that acts as a middleware between the user's Web browser and the OPAC system. The search interface can accept a natural language query from the user and reformulate it as a series of Boolean search statements that are then submitted to the OPAC. The records retrieved by the OPAC are ranked by the search interface before forwarding them to the user's Web browser. The user, then, does not need to interact directly with the Boolean OPAC but with the natural language search interface or search intermediary. The search interface interacts with the OPAC system an the user's behalf. The advantage of this approach is that no modification to the OPAC or library system is required. Furthermore, the search interface can access multiple OPACs, acting as a meta search engine, and integrate search results from various OPACs before sending them to the user. The search interface needs to incorporate a method for converting the user's natural language query into a series of Boolean search statements, and for ranking the OPAC records retrieved. The purpose of this study was to develop a relevancyranking algorithm for a search interface to Boolean OPAC systems. This is part of an on-going effort to develop a knowledge-based search interface to OPACs called the E-Referencer (Khoo et al., 1998, 1999; Poo et al., 2000). E-Referencer v. 2 that has been implemented applies a repertoire of initial search strategies and reformulation strategies to retrieve records from OPACs using the Z39.50 protocol, and also assists users in mapping query keywords to the Library of Congress subject headings."

Source

Electronic library. 22(2004) no.2, S.112-120