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Dialog And Mead Join The Relevance Ranks, Carol Tenopir, Pam Cahn

School of Information Sciences -- Faculty Publications and Other Works

New, non-Boolean, natural language search techniques - Westlaw's WIN, DIALOG's TARGET, and Mead Data Central's FREESTYLE - are based on the assumption that the standard command-driven online systems coupled with Boolean logic searching are not only difficult to learn, but may sometimes miss relevant documents. Although each new product works somewhat differently, all 3 offer an alternative to searching with command interfaces and Boolean/proximity operators. They offer natural language input, with no need for commands or logical operators. This input method is coupled with so-called associative or statistical retrieval techniques that provide relevance ranking of search results. The question of …