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This article reviews some of the more unconventional text retrieval systems, emphasising those which have been commercialised. These sophisticated systems improve on conventional retrieval by using either innovative software or hardware to increase retrieval speed or functionality, precision or recall. The software systems reviewed are: AIDA, CLARIT, Metamorph, SIMPR, STATUS/IQ, TCS, TINA and TOPIC. The hardware systems reviewed are: CAFS‐ISP, the Connection Machine, GESCAN,HSTS,MPP, TEXTRACT, TRW‐FDF and URSA.

The article begins by defining three categories of information as soft; glosses on existing quantitative databases, text in the form of market reports and analyses, individual beliefs about markets and market behaviour before proceeding to review current text‐based information systems, based on commercially available databases. Focusing on information systems that elicit and represent structural relationships that would, for example, be familiar in terms of a diagrammatic consumer behaviour model, the article examines in turn, storage and database design; means of input and transfer of text, optical scanning; direct transfer from word processors, electronic publishing; access, interrogation, search and retrieval methods. The article concludes by providing an outline framework for an extended information system incorporating the tools, techniques and facilities described, highlighting the potential of such a system for learning, preprocessing and intelligent search.

This paper describes the simulation of a nearest neighbour searching algorithm for document retrieval using a pool of microprocessors. The documents in a database are organised in a multi‐dimensional binary search tree, and the algorithm identifies the nearest neighbour for a query by a backtracking search of this tree. Three techniques are described which allow parallel searching of the tree. A PASCAL‐based, general purpose simulation system is used to simulate these techniques, using a pool of Transputer‐like microprocessors with three standard document test collections. The degree of speed‐up and processor utilisation obtained is shown to be strongly dependent upon the characteristics of the documents and queries used. The results support the use of pooled microprocessor systems for searching applications in information retrieval.

Present and possible future developments in the techniques of document management are reviewed, the major ones being text retrieval and scanning and OCR. Acquisition, indexing and thesauri, publishing and dissemination and the document management industry are also addressed. The emerging standards are reviewed and the impact of the Internet is analysed.