InfoMagic Internet Tools 1995 April/Internet Tools.iso/infoserv/www/cern/dev/www-talk.9301-9306.Z/www-talk.9301-9306/text1087.txt

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             Morning Tutorials: 8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

               Introduction to Information Retrieval

            Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow

       This tutorial will enable participants to reach an
understanding of the science and engineering underlying
information retrieval research and development.  It is aimed at
anyone who wants to:
(a)    do research in IR but has little or no basic knowledge in
       the subject;
(b)    examine the state of research and development in IR for
       commercial purposes;
(c)    teach IR at advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level but
       has no prior knowledge;
(d)    think about IR but has rarely thought about it before and
       does not know where to start.
The tutorial will answer the following questions:
(a)    What is IR?
(b)    What are sensible models for IR?
(c)    How to measure things in IR.
(d)    What impact has IR research had on the existing technology?

The tutorial will include a demonstration of a current system.

The reward for participants a feel for the excitement of
state-of-the-art in IR!

       Keith van Rijsbergen was born in Holland in 1943.  He was
educated in Holland, Indonesia, Namibia and Australia. He took a
degree in mathematics at the University of Western Australia. As
a graduate he spent two years tutoring in mathematics while
studying computer science. In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. in
computer science at Cambridge University. After almost three
years of lecturing in information retrieval and artificial
intelligence at Monash University he returned to the Cambridge
Computer Laboratory to hold a Royal Society Information Research
Fellowship. In 1980 he was appointed to the chair of computer
science at University College Dublin; from there he moved in 1986
to the Glasgow University where he is now, and indeed is head of
department.

       Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to
information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental
aspects. He has specified several theoretical models for IR and
seen some of them from the specification and prototype stage
through to production. His current research is concerned with the
design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. He
is also involved in several Esprit projects concentrating on the
engineering issues associated with the building of IR systems. He
is a fellow of the IEE and a member of the BCS. In 1993 he was
appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. He has also
recently been appointed a member of the Advisory Committee for
GMD in Germany.


    Developing Information Retrieval Applications using Object

                       Database Technology

              David J. Harper, University of Glasgow

       The field of information retrieval (IR) has yielded a range
of techniques for efficiently and effectively storing and
retrieving information items based on their text content.  The
utility of many application systems could be greatly enhanced by
employing these techniques. Examples of such applications include
office information systems, hypertext systems, and advanced
information systems for government and industry.  In this
tutorial we describe how modern IR techniques, namely automatic
indexing and best-match retrieval, can be efficiently implemented
and conveniently delivered to application developers

using object-oriented design and object database technology.  We
examine some sample applications and thereby demonstrate that the
resultant IR framework, which takes the form of a class library,
is both useable and extensible by application developers.  We
argue that our approach has a number of advantages over
traditional mechanisms of delivery such as standalone packages
and conventional programming language libraries.  The tutorial
is aimed at software designers and engineers who want to employ
modern IR techniques within application systems, academics and
researchers who are interested in implementing, experimenting
with or prototyping IR systems, and managers wanting to assess
the benefits of implementing IR applications using object
database technology.  Basic knowledge of IR and database concepts
is assumed.  A brief introduction to object-oriented concepts and
object database technology will be provided.

       David J. Harper is a lecturer in the Department of Computing
Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland.  He is a principal
investigator in Glasgow on the EEC-funded ESPRIT project
Comandos, which is concerned with the construction and management
of distributed open systems, and he leads a major research stream
on object data management services. His other research interests
include information retrieval systems, object-oriented design and
programming, formal specification of database systems, and office
information systems.

He received his B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science from Monash
University, Australia, in 1973 and his Ph.D. in Computing Science
from the University of Cambridge, England, in 1980.

              Trends in Multimedia Development

           Alan Griffiths, University of Sheffield


       New products and applications for multimedia are being
announced almost daily and there is a considerable hype over what
is still a commercially insecure field with ill-defined standards
and user groups.  This tutorial will provide a stimulating
overview of multimedia and will discuss a wide range of examples
including computer-assisted-learning (CAL), image banks,
electronic books and virtual reality. The currently available
multimedia products and services will be examined to look for
trends in development and these will be extrapolated into the
future to propose products and services which will take advantage
of the hardware, software and intellect combinations to create
imaginative learning and information environments. This
enthusiastic view will be tempered by discussing the very real,
and unresolved, problems in designing large multimedia systems.
The aims of the
tutorial are:
(a)    To provide an overview of current and future trends in
       multimedia;
(b)    To provide thought-provoking possibilities for information
       products incorporating multimedia;
(c)    To stimulate discussion on how information retrieval
       techniques can and are being implemented into multimedia
       products.

       The attendees for this tutorial will be people interested in
the stimulating prospects that multimedia offers, but not
necessarily specialists in the field. Multimedia will not provide
a solution to information retrieval but it can provide front-end
systems which use the algorithms and techniques outlined
elsewhere in the conference.

       Alan Griffiths is an independent consultant working in the
areas of database and multimedia design, and is also a part-time
lecturer in multimedia at the Department of Information Studies,
University of Sheffield, England. Over the past ten years he has
completed consultancies for a diverse group of clients ranging
from heavy industry to public sector organizations. These clients
have included Birmingham City Council, the Council for British
Archaeology, Hewlett Packard, various parts of the British
government, Basil Blackwells, Bridon Ropes and the Health &
Safety Executive. His hazardous chemical software, produced for
the Health & Safety Executive, is marketed by HMSO and used
world-wide. His presentations on multimedia have been given to
academic groups, software houses, companies and the public in
England, France, Italy, Canada and Mexico.


            Afternoon Tutorials: 1:30 - 5:30 p.m.

        Natural Language Processing for Information Retrieval

     David Lewis and Elizabeth Liddy, AT&T Bell Laboratories and
                      Syracuse University

     Our subject is the application of natural language
processing (NLP) methods to information retrieval (IR) systems.

We will discuss the characteristics of human language that make
IR difficult, and will provide an extensive treatment of both NLP
methods and their non-NLP alternatives for addressing these
characteristics.  We will also discuss the newer area of using IR
components to aid NLP systems.  This tutorial should be of
interest both to researchers interested in past work and current
research directions, and to application developers and managers
who need to choose practical strategies for immediate
implementation.  Linguistic examples will be drawn primarily from
English and Japanese, with a scattering from other languages.  A
bibliography on NLP and IR will be distributed.

       David D. Lewis ([e-mail]) is a Member of
Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ,
where his research areas are IR, NLP, machine learning, and their
intersections.  Lewis has implemented a variety of experimental
and operational IR and NLP systems, as well as being an organizer
for several large scale evaluations of such software.

       Elizabeth D. Liddy ([e-mail]) is an assistant
professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse
University, where her research areas are discourse linguistics,
semantic disambiguation, and the use of natural language
processing in information systems.  She is a co-principal
investigator on the DR-LINK project funded under the DARPA
Tipster initiative on text retrieval and filtering.


            Information Retrieval and Databases

       Norbert Fuhr, University of Dortmund, Germany

       Besides basic database functions such as concurrency,
recovery, security and integrity, future IR systems will also
need data modelling concepts for coping with structured documents
and powerful query languages in order to ask for any kind of
object in the database (for example authors, affiliations,
journals). On the other hand, database systems are required to
handle textual attributes and to provide appropriate text
retrieval facilities. This tutorial will present specific
database concepts which are important for both types
of systems.

       After a short introduction to basic database concepts, three
major lines of research will be considered:  modelling data
structure (relational and  NF2 models); modelling  structure  and

behavior (object-oriented databases); and modelling uncertainty
(Fuzzy, Bayesian and Dempster-Shafer approaches).  For each of
these approaches, examples for their application to IR problems
will be presented.

       The target audience is those who have basic knowledge in IR
and now want to learn about the database aspects of the field.
The course would be most useful for people designing or building
IR or database systems.

       Norbert Fuhr is professor in the computer science department
of the University of Dortmund, Germany.  He holds a diploma and
doctorate in Computer Science from the Technical University of
Darmstadt.  He is well-known for his theoretical and experimental
work on probabilistic IR models.  Recently, his research
interests have focused
on the application of IR methods to factual databases and the
integration of IR and database systems.


        Non-Textual Compression in Full-Text IR Systems


           Shmuel T. Klein, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

       Data compression has received increased attention lately,
resulting in a large number of recent publications in this area.
The tutorial presents an overview of these recent developments.
We shall first classify the various types of files that appear in
a full-text
retrieval system. The focus will be on the auxiliary structured
files, such as dictionaries, concordances and various forms of
bitmaps, (which may significantly enhance the retrieval
algorithms) and will present state of the art approaches for
compressing them. The tutorial
is intended for researchers, designers and users of large textual
IR systems. By the end of the tutorial, the participant should be
able, for a given file, to choose the appropriate compression
technique and design his/her own encoding and decoding routines.

       Shmuel T. Klein received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel. He then spent three years at the
University of Chicago and is now at Bar-Ilan University in
Israel. Dr. Klein has worked on two of the world's largest
natural language full-text information retrieval systems: the
Responsa Project at Bar-Ilan University (in Hebrew),
and the Tresor de la Langue Francaise at the University of
Chicago (in French), and has published several papers on various
aspects of compression in IR systems.
- -- - - - - - - - ---more on IANET '93- - - ---- -
                 INFORMATION ACCESS AND THE NETWORKS
              A Research Workshop (held after SIGIR'93)
                  July 1, 1993  ---  Pittsburgh, PA

Information access involving networks is one of the most important
growth areas in the broad field of information technology.  User
demand has caused a massive growth in the size of the Internet and
the
amount of information accessible on it.  This has made it imperative
to develop new technologies to provide an infrastructure for this new
information space.  This workshop will bring together researchers and
developers to discuss network-based information services in both
general and specific terms, drawing upon those attending ACM SIGIR
'93
and the communities related to:
        * Archie
        * Digital Libraries
        * Gopher
        * HyperPage
        * Knowbots
        * NCSA Mosaic
        * NNTP/Usenet
        * Prospero
        * Veronica
        * WAIS
        * WWW (WorldWideWeb)
        * Z39.50
along with other related initiatives, protocols, systems, and
services.

Attendees will include persons with an active interest in
network-based information systems and relevant research.

Presentations will include design and implementation of
client-server architectures, resource discovery, distributed file
systems and services, development of integrated network tools, and
innovative

applications of more basic technologies, such as bulletin board
systems and

electronic mail.

The workshop format involves a plenary session from 8:30-11:30 a.m.
with invited speakers, each of them addressing a major theme in the
area of wide-area networking. After some discussion, the workshop
will
break up into groups, starting with a working lunch.  The
organization
of these groups and assignment of participants to them will be based
on a short interest statement provided by each participant.

The workshop will conclude with brief summary presentations by
group leaders.  Notes from the plenary talks and interest
statements will be provided to attendees and made available
for online access after the workshop.

In addition to discussion of the initiatives, protocols, systems, and
services listed above, other topics of interest include:
         * scaling - to handle more users, more databases or
documents,
                 bigger databases, larger data items (e.g.,
multimedia)
         * efficiency - algorithms, data structures,
                simulations, experiments
         * effectiveness - evaluation methods, studies, designs
         * interfaces - platforms, user needs, development methods,
                 evaluations, integration with other applications
         * limitations and future plans for enhancement
         * progress in developing standards or using existing ones
         * technical details relating to protocols, implementations
         * user studies, application surveys, innovative uses
         * integration - plans, designs, requirements,
implementations
                 of systems to integrate information access over
                 the networks
         * novel applications using network-enabled information
access
                 technology.

If you are interested in attending, please prepare a 1-page statement
of interest, covering your background, experience, and topics of
interest.  Priority, in case of limited space, will be given to SIGIR
attendees and those who have submitted interest statements.

The Program Committee includes:
        George Brett, CNIDR
        Edward Fox, Chair (of workshop, SIGIR), Virginia Tech
        Jose-Marie Griffiths, U. Tenn.
        Brewster Kahle, WAIS Inc.
        Clifford Lynch, U. California
        Craig Stanfill, Thinking Machines
        Craig Summerhill, Coalition for Networked Information
        Chris Tomer, Co-chair and local arrangements coordinator

Interest statements should be submitted by May 15.  They may
accompany

registration forms or be sent directly to:
        Chris Tomer
        School of Library and Information Science
        University of Pittsburgh
        Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
        tel: [phone]; fax: [phone]
        email: [e-mail]

Further information is available from:
        Ed Fox, ([e-mail]; [e-mail]) or

        Chris Tomer ([e-mail])


                Cost for this one-day session is $50,
               which includes coffee breaks and lunch.

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