A FORMAL THEORY OF CONCEPTUAL AFFILIATION FOR DOCUMENT RECONSTRUCTION. REPT. NO. 1: THE AFFILIATION-VALUE MODEL.

Abstract

It is first argued that there are significant logical and epistemological issues involved in the development of an adequate text-processing procedure for document retrieval systems. A brief discussion of these issues follows. It is next shown that the problem of characterizing or indexing a document is a particular form of the general logical problem of abstraction. The report introduces the notion of concretion into retrieval theory, and discusses the problem of reconstructing documents from their given characteristics. A major goal is to show that different coherence patterns for characteristics indicate differences among documents as to form, style, structure and content. An affiliation-value model is constructed, in terms of which the conceptual closeness and importance of characteristics to their parent documents are numerically expressible. Document structure, organization and content are reflected in the calculation of affiliation-values, so that it becomes possible to identify the form and nature of documents given only certain minimal information regarding their characteristics or index terms. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 22, 1966
Accession Number
AD0640083

Entities

People

  • Donald J. Hillman
  • Robert C. Heiser

Organizations

  • Lehigh University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Index Terms
  • Indexes
  • Text Processing

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Theoretical Analysis.