Computer Engineering Commons^™

Towards The Use Of Situational Information In Information Retrieval, Robert N. Oddy, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ann Bishop, Eileen Martin, Joseph Elewononi, Bhaskaran Balakrishnan

Robert Oddy

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well-defined discourse- level structure, which is revealed by lexical …