Paragraph-based nearest neighbour searching in full-text documents
Suliman Hawamdeh, Peter Willett · 1989
s Service to assist indexing and abstracting staff in the task of subject analysis. Paragraphs were found to be the the most useful level of description for providing interactive access to sections of full-text documents. More recently, Tenopir[19] has emphasized the general effectiveness of paragraph-level searching in a comparison of different retrieval strategies for full-text databases. In this paper, we evaluate the use of the nearest neighbour searching model[1,3], for paragraph-based access to full-text documents. We shall first describe this model and compare it with the better established Boolean retrieval model. We then outline the experimental system we have used together with the details of the queries and fulltext documents that have formed the basis for our comparison of Boolean and nearest neighbour searching; the results of this extended comparison are discussed in a separate section. The next section then proposes an alternative type of nearest neighbour search that c...