IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 July 21, 1997 Volume XIV, Number 26 Issue 364 ********************************************************** I. QUERIES 1. Is Precision Too Precise?: 'Neo-Conventional' Functionality II. JOBS 1. Ferris State U.: Health Sciences Librarian 2. BFGoodrich: Information Specialist III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. Electronic Scholarly Publication 2. Washington Update July 18, 1997 B. Meetings 1. Final Call for Participation - EMNLP2 2. New Learning Communities Conference C. Miscellaneous 1. Digital Object Identifier System ********************************************************** I. QUERIES I.1. Fr: Gerry McKiernan Re: Is Precision Too Precise?: 'Neo-Conventional' Functionality for User-Controlled Information Retrieval _Is Precision Too Precise?: 'Neo-Conventional' Functionality for User-Controlled Information Retrieval_ As part of my never-ending review of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, I initially focused on technologies or approaches that would explicitly enhance identification of relevant records by increasing the precision of results. Implicit in my review is a complementary belief that there is also a need to provide opportunities not only for systems and algorithms to mine data and discover knowledge, but also a need to enable users to mine and discover data and knowledge within a 'structured Information Space'. That we need to recognize the inherent desire [shall we say the Human Need to Browse] to discover and therefore need to create information systems that facilitate such discovery in a user's Information Quest. [For a great review on the topic of browsing, folk are referred to the excellent work of Chang and Rice as well as the bibliography by Kurth and Petters noted below: Shan-ju Chang and Ronald E. Rice, "Browsing: a multidimensional framework," Annual review of information science and technology 28:231-276 (1993). Martin Kurth and Thomas A Peters, "Browsing in information systems: an extensive annotated bibliography of the literature," Library hi tech bibliography 10: x, 275 1995] Belkin (at Rutgers) as well as others have clearly documented the users desire to truly _interact_ with information systems in the Information Seeking process. My belief in the value of structured browsing for Knowledge Discovery was the prime reason why I adopted a standard library classification scheme for my CyberStacks(sm) collection. Likewise recognition of the inherent limitations of the use of one structured Information Space, led me to not only consider the benefits of a search engine [still pending], but the benefits of enhancing the search process by the use of appropriate algorithms that would increase the identification of the most relevant set of records, thereby alleviating the use of the the associated tedium. My recognition of the nature and value of browsing so well documented by Chang and Rice in their seminal review paper noted above, has led me to create two 'neo-conventional' mechanisms with CyberStacks(sm) that offer users a new ['neo'=new] type of browsing that had not been available in conventional public information public information systems at the time [Since creating these function, the experimental online catalog of the Library of Congress has in fact incorporated features that facilitate enhanced structured browsing. For a test drive of this experimental OPAC, users are invited to visit my Onion Patch(sm) project at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Onion.htm ] Within CyberStacks(sm), I have created a Cross-Classification Index. This index also users to browse resources classified within an individual LC category from an alphabetical listing of the Library of Congress topic headings associated with a specific class number. It is an effort to provide an entry vocabulary to a classification range in which users will find related classification topics offered for their consideration. This functionality has been provided in the belief that many users do not know _exactly_ what they want, but they know it when they see it [It's like when I go shopping with my wife for a new shirt or pair of shoes - I can't always explain the style or color of what I want, but when I find it, I (usually) know it [and buy it] [:-]!] A second 'neo-conventional' functionality that has been greatly expanded in CyberStacks(sm) is a Title Index icon-link that allows users to enter the segment of the CyberStacks(sm) where an individual resource has been described and classified along with others of a similar classification. This feature allows users to move from a possibly-relevant title into the subject class where it has been classified and presents users with resources that also may be relevant given their similar grouping. It's the equivalent of allowing users to browse the shelves of a library from a selected title, a feature found within the Library of Congress experimental system, that appears to becoming commonplace in more OPAC systems (e.g. Innovative Interfaces) My Cross-Classification Index is viewed as a precursor to other kinds of browsing structures within CyberStacks(sm), notably a 'hyper-thesaurus' that would allow users to browse the syndectic structure (e.g. broader, narrower, and related) terms, phrases and/or subject headings assigned to records within a database (WWW, OPAC, etc.). I expect that the new Scout Report Signpost that uses not only the Library of Congress classification, but LC subject headings (LCSH) and/or the ADAM project in the UK that uses the _Art and Architecture Thesaurus_ will be among the first to provide enhanced structured browsing to their respective collections through the implementation of some form of 'hyper-thesaurus'. In addition to enhancing access to information through the use of conventional structures, I believe that we will also see the development of 'neo-conventional' vocabulary structures that will allow users to browse through pathways of linked subject headings derived from the associations of subject headings and their associations with subject headings of associated records [What?]. A precursor of this functionality [and my inspiration] can be found in the 'Related' subject heading option and the 'Sort' option in the Lib of Congress experimental system. My vision of such a function is still 'Under Construction' [I hope that with the right inspiration I will be able to (more) fully articulate this functionality in the near future] In the meantime, I would appreciate learning about other inspired (or not-so-inspired) methods of structured browsing in Web as well as OPAC databases. [Certainly, the Information Visualization technologies in my _Big Picture_ clearinghouse offer 'neo-conventional' forms of structured browsing]. As always, any and all leads, suggestions, recommendations, opinions, citations,etc. would be most welcome! Regards, Gerry McKiernan Curator, CyberStacks(sm) Iowa State University Ames IA 50011 gerrymck@iastate.edu http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/ P.S. For an elaboration of the Cross-Classification Index and Title Index icon-link feature, interested folk are invited to review my article in the _Journal of Internet Cataloging_ "The New/Old World (Wide Web) Order: The Application of 'Neo-Conventional' Functionality to Facilitate Access and Use of a WWW Database of Science and Technology Internet Resources". _Journal of Internet Cataloging 1(1): 47-55 (1997). ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Dick Perrin Re: Ferris State U.: Health Sciences Librarian POSITION: Health Sciences Librarian (tenure track) Department of Reference & Instructional Services EFFECTIVE DATE: Open until filled. RESPONSIBILITIES: Provides reference, information and instruction in the health sciences primarily serving the Colleges of Allied Health Sciences, Optometry and Pharmacy, as well as biological and related sciences. Coordinates the activities of part- time librarians, clerical personnel and student assistants. Serves as the liaison (subject specialist) to the aforementioned colleges. Shares reference desk service including some evenings and weekends. Participates in collection development, library assessment and appropriate university-wide activities. Fosters networking in west Michigan to continue building a regional resource library in the health-related fields. QUALIFICATIONS: Required: ALA accredited masters degree in a library/information science program; experience in an academic health sciences or hospital library; supervisory experience; excellent communication, interpersonal, leadership and organizational skills. Experience in bibliographic instruction as well as using electronic information systems including online catalogs, networked CD-ROMs and Internet/Web. Preferred: Undergraduate degree in the basic, life or health sciences; additional graduate degree; membership in the Academy of Health Information Professionals; competency in the area of nursing, public health administration, pharmacy, optometry or allied health; successful experience as a team leader. SALARY: Salary Range: $29,000-$35,000 depending upon experience. Additionally, Ferris State University offers an excellent benefit and retirement package for this 12-month tenure-track appointment with academic rank. APPLICATION: Apply with a letter, resume and three references from supervisors or colleagues solicited especially for this position. Please include their names, current addresses and telephone numbers with your application. In your letter of application, relate your experiences and qualifications to the responsibilities of this position. Copy(ies) of your transcript(s) will be required prior to an interview. APPLY TO: Health Sciences Librarian Search Committee Attn: Joan Boroff, Administrative Services Ferris State University Library 1201 South State Street Big Rapids, MI 49307-2747 APPLICATION DEADLINE: Application review will begin September 1, 1997, and will continue until the position is filled. ********** II.2. Fr: Linda Hashlamoun Re: BFGoodrich: Information Specialist Information Specialist: The BFGoodrich Advanced Technology Group has an immediate opening for an Information Specialist. Located in Brecksville, OH the Charles Cross Goodrich Information Center (IC) supports a diverse population of professionals engaged in growing BFG's Aerospace and Specialty Chemicals Groups. This is an opportunity to learn and apply rapidly evolving Information Technologies to diverse BFG business processes including R&D, sales/marketing, and intellectual property activities. Applicants will be challenged to undertake advanced on-line searching responsibilities and contribute to the development of a modern, virtual library environment. In this organization Information Specialists work with technical and business professionals in the acquisition and analysis of data critical to enterprise growth and competitiveness. Position responsibilities include on-line searching, gathering competitive intelligence, information interpretation, and participation in strategic analyses. Candidates must have significant experience with on-line database information retrieval from sources such as Dialog, STN, WWW, and be skilled in patent searching. Position requires a masters degree in library and information science (MLS). Candidates with undergraduate degrees in sciences, engineering or business are preferred. A high level of competency with Windows-based computing platforms is a must. Two years experience with on-line searching software and techniques is essential. Qualified candidates are encouraged to mail or fax resume with cover letter to: Human Resource Manager; BFGoodrich Advanced Technology Group; Attn.: Information Specialist Position; 9921 Brecksville Road, Brecksville, OH 44141; Fax 216.447.5981. An Equal Opportunity Employer, M/F/D/V. ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Louise Fisch Re: Electronic Scholarly Publication A new publication, "Issues and Innovations in Electronic Scholarly Publication," published by the ARL Office of Management Services, offers a snapshot of current electronic scholarly publishing initiatives. The publication is based on a series of interviews with professionals in 20 libraries, consortia, and publishing enterprises and takes a broad look at the issues associated with electronic scholarly publication. "Reports from the Field" examines the innovative ways in which electronic materials are being acquired and distributed, and individual library and publishing projects are showcased. The "Issues and Trends" section highlights overarching topics associated with electronic publication ventures including: staffing,licensing and copyright, changing roles, archiving, and collection management. For more information, or to order "Issues and Innovations in Electronic Scholarly Publication," call 202-296-2296 or email . ********** III.A.2. Fr: Garret Sern Re: Washington Update July 18, 1997 FARNET's Washington Update --- July 18, 1997 IN THIS ISSUE: FCC releases order on reconsideration - what does this mean for universal service? Status of NGI appropriations >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> White House provides forum for filtering software Written from FARNET's Washington office, "FARNET's Washington Update" is a service to FARNET members and other interested subscribers. We gratefully acknowledge EDUCOM's NTTF and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) for additional support. If you would like more information about the Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact Garret Sern at garret@farnet.org. ********** III.B.1. Fr: Claire Cardie Re: Final Call for Participation - EMNLP2 Final Call for Participation Second Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2) Brown University Providence, Rhode Island, August 1-2, 1997 (Immediately following AAAI) COMPLETE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE AT: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/cardie/emnlp2.html CONFERENCE OVERVIEW: In the spirit of SIGDAT events, this conference offers a general forum for novel research in corpus-based and statistical natural language processing. In addition, a number of sessions of this year's conference are devoted to new research describing and evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and recent advances in corpus-based NLP as applied to INFORMATION EXTRACTION and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (IR). Papers will be presented in the following research areas: - robust parsing, phrase structure analysis - language modelling - word sense disambiguation - anaphora resolution - event categorization - discourse structure identification - tagging multi-lingual texts - machine learning methods as applied to problems in NLP - term and name identification - text categorization - text segmentation - lexicon construction INVITED TALKS: FRIDAY, AUGUST 1 TOM MITCHELL (CMU) "Machine Learning and Extracting Information from the Web" SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 MICHAEL MAULDIN (CMU/Lycos) "The Lycos System: Practical Information Retrieval" FINAL PROGRAM FRIDAY, AUGUST 1 8:00-9:00:REGISTRATION, continental breakfast 9:00-9:15:WELCOME 9:15-10:30:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *A Linear Observed Time Statistical Parser Based on Maximum Entropy Models Adwait Ratnaparkhi *Global Thresholding and Multiple-Pass Parsing Joshua Goodman *An Efficient Distribution of Labor in a Two Stage Robust Interpretation Process Carolyn Penstein Rose and Alon Lavie 10:30-11:00:COFFEE BREAK (joint break with Uncertainty in AI Conference) 11:00-12:15:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Text Segmentation Using Exponential Models Doug Beeferman, Adam Berger, and John Lafferty *Detecting Subject Boundaries Within Text: A Language Independent Statistical Approach Korin Richmond, Andrew Smith, and Einat Amitay *Mistake-Driven Learning in Text Categorization Ido Dagan, Yael Karov, and Dan Roth 12:15-1:45:CATERED LUNCH (included in registration fee) 1:45-2:45:INVITED TALK - Tom Mitchell (CMU) "Machine Learning and Extracting Information from the Web" 2:45-3:00:COFFEE BREAK 3:00-3:50:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Tagging Grammatical Functions Thorsten Brants, Wojciech Skut, and Brigitte Krenn *On Aligning Trees Jo Calder 3:50-4:15:COFFEE BREAK 4:15-5:30:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Aggregate and Mixed-order Markov Models for Statistical Language Processing Lawrence Saul and Fernando Pereira *Assigning Grammatical Relations with a Back-Off Model Erika F. de Lima *Automatic Discovery of Non-Compositional Compounds in Parallel Data I. Dan Melamed SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 8:00-8:30:REGISTRATION, continental breakfast 8:35-9:50:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Learning to Tag Multi-Lingual Texts Through Observation Scott W. Bennett, Chinatsu Aone, and Craig Lovell *A Corpus-Based Approach for Building Semantic Lexicons Ellen Riloff and Jessica Shepherd *Inducing Terminology for Lexical Acquisition Roberto Basili, Gianluca De Rossi, and Maria Teresa Pazienza 9:50-10:20:COFFEE BREAK 10:20-11:10:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Name Searching and Information Retrieval Paul Thompson and Christopher C. Dozier *Lexicon Effects on Chinese Information Retrieval K.L. Kwok 11:10-11:25:COFFEE BREAK 11:25-12:15:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Attaching Multiple Prepositional Phrases: Generalized Backed-Off Estimation Paola Merlo, Matthew W. Crocker, and Cathy Berthouzoz *Learning Methods for Combining Linguistic Indicators to Classify Verbs Eric Siegel 12:15-12:30:SIGDAT business meeting 12:30-1:45:CATERED LUNCH (included in registration fee) 1:45-2:45:INVITED TALK - Michael Mauldin (CMU/Lycos) The Lycos System: Practical Information Retrieval 2:45-3:00:COFFEE BREAK 3:00-3:50:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Probabilistic Coreference in Information Extraction Andrew Kehler *An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution Janyce Wiebe, Tom O'Hara, Ken McKeever, and Thorsten Ohrstrom-Sandgren 3:50-4:15:COFFEE BREAK 4:15-5:30:PAPER PRESENTATIONS: *Word Sense Disambiguation Based on Structured Semantic Space Ji Donghong and Huang Changning *Distinguishing Word Senses in Untagged Text Ted Pedersen and Rebecca Bruce *Exemplar-Based Word Sense Disambiguation: Some Recent Improvements Hwee Tou Ng REGISTRATION ADDRESS: E-mail:emnlp2@cs.jhu.edu Regular mail: EMNLP2 c/o David Yarowsky - SIGDAT Department of Computer Science Johns Hopkins University 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2694 Fax: +1 (410) 516-6134 ********** III.B.1. Fr: Louise Fisch Re: New Learning Communities Conference It's not too late to register for CNI's New Learning Communities Conference to be held Friday, August 22 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, DC. The all day conference is intended for faculty, librarians, technologists, instructional designers, and others interested in collaborative teaching and learning that includes the use of information resources on the Internet. CNI's New Learning Communities Program supports projects that: encourage collaborative teaching and learning in both curriculum development and delivery; integrate use and evaluation of information resources into the curriculum; and use the Internet to facilitate the teaching and learning process. The program, co-sponsored by ACRL, AAHE, and Educom, is supported by a grant from the US Department of Education. The registration fee is $50. To register, email Joan Lippincott at . The email message should include registrant's name, title, and address. Registration checks, made payable to the Coalition for Networked Information, should then be sent to CNI, 21 Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, 20036. You may also register my mail. FURTHER INFORMATION on the program and the conference is available at . ********** III.C.1. Fr: Marie O'Mara Re: Digital Object Identifier System Defense Technical Information Center presents The Association of American Publishers Digital Object Identifier System Managing Electronic Content The Association of American Publishers has designed a system for marking digital objects in order to facilitate electronic commerce and enable copyright management systems. That system, called the Digital Object Identifier System, is now under development, in partnership with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, and is expected to be live on a limited scale in August 1997. Learn how DOIs might be used in practice by not only publishers but related organizations involved with Abstracting and Indexing, information aggregators, subscription agents, and libraries. SPEAKERS: Carol Risher, Vice President for Copyright and New Technology for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), coordinates copyright enforcement activities, including strategic litigation, in the U.S. and overseas. She assists AAP members in their efforts to move from print-based products to electronic products. She is responsible for monitoring new technologies that affect publishers' markets and working with AAP members to promote development of pre-competitive standards such as the Digital Object Identifier that facilitate Internet commerce. Larry Lannom is with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and is responsible for the Handle System and Repository. WHERE: HQ Complex Building Auditorium 8725 John J. Kingman Rd, Ft Belvoir, VA http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/directions.html WHEN: August 11, 1997 TIME: 1:30-3:30 pm R.S.V.P. to Julia Foscue, email: jfoscue@dtic.mil tel: (703) 767-8236 ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests and submissions to: NCGUR@UCCMVSA.UCOP.EDU Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch calur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.ucop.edu The IRLIST Archives is set up for anonymous FTP. Using anonymous FTP via the host ftp.dla.ucop.edu, the files will be found in the directory /data/ftp/pub/irl, stored in subdirectories by year (e.g., data/ftp/pub/irl/1993). Search or browse archived IR-L Digest issues on the Web at: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/irlist/ These files are not to be sold or used for commercial purposes. Contact Nancy Gusack for more information on IRLIST. 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