Project MEDICO Third Progress Report / Susan Artandi and Stanley Baxendale.

This report describes the searching methods and the search program for the automatic indexing method which was developed and implemented in an earlie r phase of the project. The indexing method generates index tags automatically from English language text and creates a machine searchable file of index records for the document being processed. Since the First Progress Report the indexing program has been modified to facilitate the updating and expansion of the computer-stored dictionary. The MEDICO file which is the output of the automatic indexing program is a direct file stored on magnetic tape and is sequenced by document accession number. The primary access point of the file can involve as many as four hierarchical levels and generic searches are easily implemented. Boolean searches allow for the retrieval of highly specific information. Prior to searching, the Boolean expressions corresponding to the natural language query are formulated by the human searcher. Normalization of the query to make it compatible with the index language is accomplished automatically by the computer. The tape file is searched sequentially to search for the presence or absence of terms as prescribed in the Boolean expression. Several queries can be processed simultaneously and the output for each query can be printed out as a separate unit. (Author/JW)

Microfiche. [Washington D.C.]: ERIC Clearinghouse microfiches : positive.