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The purpose of this study is to carry out a systematic literature review for evidence-based assessment of the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. It also aimed to identify the evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools which may be used in evaluating digital information retrieval systems.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of 344 publications from LISA and 238 from Scopus has been carried out to identify the evaluation studies for analysis, and 15 evaluation studies have been analyzed.

This study presents evidences for the effectiveness of thesaurus in digital information retrieval systems. Various methods for evaluating digital information systems have been identified. Also, a wide range of evaluation measures and data collection tools have been identified.

The study was limited to the literature published in English language and indexed in LISA and Scopus. The evaluation methods, evaluation measures and data collection tools identified in this study may be used to design more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information retrieval systems.

The findings have significant implications for the administrators of any type of digital information retrieval systems in making more informed decisions toward implementation of thesaurus in resource description and access to digital collections.

This study extends our knowledge on the potentials of thesauri in digital information retrieval systems. It also provides cues for designing more cognizant evaluation studies for digital information systems.

The purpose of this study is to explore the retrieval effectiveness of three image search engines (ISE) – Google Images, Yahoo Image Search and Picsearch in terms of their image retrieval capability. It is an effort to carry out a Cranfield experiment to know how efficient the commercial giants in the image search are and how efficient an image specific search engine is.

The keyword search feature of three ISEs – Google images, Yahoo Image Search and Picsearch – was exploited to make search with keyword captions of photos as query terms. Selected top ten images were used to act as a testbed for the study, as images were searched in accordance with features of the test bed. Features to be looked for included size (1200 × 800), format of images (JPEG/JPG) and the rank of the original image retrieved by ISEs under study. To gauge the overall retrieval effectiveness in terms of set standards, only first 50 result hits were checked. Retrieval efficiency of select ISEs were examined with respect to their precision and relative recall.

Yahoo Image Search outscores Google Images and Picsearch both in terms of precision and relative recall. Regarding other criteria – image size, image format and image rank in search results, Google Images is ahead of others.

The study only takes into consideration basic image search feature, i.e. text-based search.

The study implies that image search engines should focus on relevant descriptions. The study evaluated text-based image retrieval facilities and thereby offers a choice to users to select best among the available ISEs for their use.

The study provides an insight into the effectiveness of the three ISEs. The study is one of the few studies to gauge retrieval effectiveness of ISEs. Study also produced key findings that are important for all ISE users and researchers and the Web image search industry. Findings of the study will also prove useful for search engine companies to improve their services.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply traditional information retrieval (IR) evaluation methods based on standards from the Text REtrieval Conference and web search evaluation to all types of modern library information systems (LISs) including online public access catalogues, discovery systems, and digital libraries that provide web search features to gather information from heterogeneous sources.

The authors apply conventional procedures from IR evaluation to the LIS context considering the specific characteristics of modern library materials.

The authors introduce a framework consisting of five parts: search queries, search results, assessors, testing, and data analysis. The authors show how to deal with comparability problems resulting from diverse document types, e.g., electronic articles vs printed monographs and what issues need to be considered for retrieval tests in the library context.

The framework can be used as a guideline for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies in the library context.

Although a considerable amount of research has been done on IR evaluation, and standards for conducting retrieval effectiveness studies do exist, to the authors’ knowledge this is the first attempt to provide a systematic framework for evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of twenty-first-century LISs. The authors demonstrate which issues must be considered and what decisions must be made by researchers prior to a retrieval test.

Full‐text documents are usually searched by means of a Boolean retrieval algorithm that requires the user to specify the logical relationships between the terms of a query. In this paper, we summarise the results to date of a continuing programme of research at the University of Sheffield to investigate the use of nearest‐neighbour retrieval algorithms for full‐text searching. Given a natural‐language query statement, our methods result in a ranking of the paragraphs comprising a full‐text document in order of decreasing similarity with the query, where the similarity for each paragraph is determined by the number of keyword stems that it has in common with the query. A full‐text document test collection has been created to allow systematic tests of retrieval effectiveness to be carried out. Experiments with this collection demonstrate that nearest‐neighbour searching provides a means for paragraph‐based access to full‐text documents that is of comparable effectiveness to both Boolean and hypertext searching and that index term weighting schemes which have been developed for the searching of bibliographical databases can also be used to improve the effectiveness of retrieval from full‐text databases. A current project is investigating the extent to which a paragraph‐based full‐text retrieval system can be used to augment the explication facilities of an expert system on welding.

The progress of parallel computing in Information Retrieval (IR) is reviewed. In particular we stress the importance of the motivation in using parallel computing for text retrieval. We analyse parallel IR systems using a classification defined by Rasmussen and describe some parallel IR systems. We give a description of the retrieval models used in parallel information processing. We describe areas of research which we believe are needed.

In this paper methods for both speeding up passage processing and examining more passages using parallel computers are explored. The number of passages processed are varied in order to examine the effect on retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. The particular algorithm applied has previously been used to good effect in Okapi experiments at TREC. This algorithm and the mechanism for applying parallel computing to speed up processing are described.

The purpose of this paper to investigate the effectiveness of selected search features in the major English and Chinese search engines and compare the search engines’ retrieval effectiveness.

The search engines Google, Google China, and Baidu were selected for this study. Common search features such as title search, basic search, exact phrase search, PDF search, and URL search, were identified and used. Search results from using the five features in the search engines were collected and compared. One‐way ANOVA and regression analysis were used to compare the retrieval effectiveness of the search engines.

It was found that Google achieved the best retrieval performance with all five search features among the three search engines. Moreover Google achieved the best webpage ranking performance.

The findings of this study improve the understanding of English and Chinese search engines and the differences between them in terms of search features, and can be used to assist users in choosing appropriate and effective search strategies when they search for information on the internet.

The original contributions of this paper are that the Chinese and English search engines in both languages are compared for retrieval effectiveness. Five search features were evaluated, compared, and analysed in the two different language environments by using the discounted cumulative gain method.

In this paper we report on a theoretical model of structured document indexing and retrieval based on the Dempster‐Shafer Theory of Evidence. This includes a description of our model of structured document retrieval, the representation of structured documents, the representation of individual components, how components are combined, details of the combination process, and how relevance is captured within the model. We also present a detailed account of an implementation of the model, and an evaluation scheme designed to test the effectiveness of our model. Finally we report on the details and results of a series of experiments performed to investigate the characteristics of the model.

This paper seeks to examine image retrieval within two different contexts: a monolingual context where the language of the query is the same as the indexing language and a multilingual context where the language of the query is different from the indexing language. The study also aims to compare two different approaches for the indexing of ordinary images representing common objects: traditional image indexing with the use of a controlled vocabulary and free image indexing using uncontrolled vocabulary.

This research uses three data collection methods. An analysis of the indexing terms was employed in order to examine the multiplicity of term types assigned to images. A simulation of the retrieval process involving a set of 30 images was performed with 60 participants. The quantification of the retrieval performance of each indexing approach was based on the usability measures, that is, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the user. Finally, a questionnaire was used to gather information on searcher satisfaction during and after the retrieval process.

The results of this research are twofold. The analysis of indexing terms associated with all the 3,950 images provides a comprehensive description of the characteristics of the four non‐combined indexing forms used for the study. Also, the retrieval simulation results offers information about the relative performance of the six indexing forms (combined and non‐combined) in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency (temporal and human) and the image searcher's satisfaction.

The findings of the study suggest that, in the near future, the information systems could benefit from allowing an increased coexistence of controlled vocabularies and uncontrolled vocabularies, resulting from collaborative image tagging, for example, and giving the users the possibility to dynamically participate in the image‐indexing process, in a more user‐centred way.

With the vast amount of multilingual information available online, it becomes increasingly critical for libraries to use various multilingual information access techniques in order to effectively support patrons' online information requests. However, this is still a relatively under‐explored area. This paper aims to study the effectiveness and the adoptability of query expansion and translation enhancement in the context of interactive multilingual information access.

Relying on an interactive multilingual information access system called ICE‐TEA, the authors conducted a controlled experiment (English‐to‐Chinese translation) involving human subjects to assess the retrieval effectiveness, analyzed the collected search logs to examine users' behavior, and employed pre‐ and post‐questionnaires to obtain users' opinions about the system.

The results confirm that significant improvement in retrieval effectiveness can be achieved by combining query expansion with translation enhancement (as compared to a case when there is no relevance feedback). However, users' ability to understand, interact with and even perceive the complex process of searches involving the combination of query expansion and translation enhancement may greatly impact the effectiveness of the techniques. The results also confirm that human‐generated queries were short queries, which calls for careful consideration of how longer queries perform in real search because many search engines rely on longer and more complex queries.

This study examines two important relevance feedback techniques in the context of human‐involved multilingual information access. This study is a valuable addition to the information seeking behaviour literature.