Implications For Information Science Research Articles

Improving social book search using structure semantics, bibliographic descriptions and social metadata

Social Book Search is an Information Retrieval (IR) approach that studies the impact of the Social Web on book retrieval. To understand this impact, it is necessary to develop a stronger classical baseline run by considering the contribution of query formulation, document representation, and retrieval model. Such a stronger baseline run can be re-ranked using metadata features from the Social Web to see if it improves the relevance of book search results over the classical IR approaches. However, existing studies neither considered collectively the contribution of the three mentioned factors in the baseline retrieval nor devised a re-ranking formula to exploit the collective impact of the metadata features in re-ranking. To fill these gaps in the literature, this research work first performs baseline retrieval by considering all three factors. For query formulation, it uses topic sets obtained from the discussion threads of LibraryThing. For book representation in indexing, it uses metadata from social websites including Amazon and LibraryThing. For the role of the retrieval model, it experiments with traditional, probabilistic, and fielded models. Second, it devises a re-ranking solution that exploits ratings, tags, reviews, and votes in reordering the baseline search results. Our best-performing retrieval methods outperform existing approaches on several topic sets and relevance judgments. The findings suggest that using all topic fields formulates the best search queries. The user-generated content gives better book representation if made part of the search index. Re-ranking the classical/baseline results improves relevance. The findings have implications for information science, IR, and Interactive IR.

Towards the idea of information science as an interscience

The purpose of this article will be to emphasize the role of the core aspect of the scientific endeavour that is fundamental to any good science, but that is currently largely neglected, namely reflection, or the intellectual activity in science. The focus will be on the challenges posed by some contemporary situations and developments to the intellectual activities of the scientific endeavour. The assumption is that science is first and foremost an intellectual activity, an activity of thought. The question to be addressed then will be: How do we, as Information Scientists, respond intellectually to what is happening in the world of information and knowledge development and work, given the context of new socio-cultural and knowledge landscapes. The emphasis will be on the rethinking of human thinking, as our unique human ability that enables us to cope with the world in which we live with its dynamic, challenging and ever changing circumstances and demands, in terms of the commitments characteristic of the very unique science we are involved with. Different approaches to the establishment of a new scientific spirit will be explored, the demands these developments pose for human thinking will be highlighted, and the implications for Information Science regarding its proposed functioning as a nomad science, and its proposed responsibility of focusing on informatization and inventiveness, will be specified.

Individual differences in the interpretation of text: Implications for information science

Many tasks in library and information science (e.g., indexing, abstracting, classification, and text analysis techniques such as discourse and content analysis) require text meaning interpretation, and, therefore, any individual differences in interpretation are relevant and should be considered, especially for applications in which these tasks are done automatically. This article investigates individual differences in the interpretation of one aspect of text meaning that is commonly used in such automatic applications: lexical cohesion and lexical semantic relations. Experiments with 26 participants indicate an approximately 40% difference in interpretation. In total, 79, 83, and 89 lexical chains (groups of semantically related words) were analyzed in 3 texts, respectively. A major implication of this result is the possibility of modeling individual differences for individual users. Further research is suggested for different types of texts and readers than those used here, as well as similar research for different aspects of text meaning.

Aspects ofJASIS authorship through five decades

The Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) is completing 50 years of publication. Aspects of authorship of papers in JASIS were studied by examining one volume from each decade of JASIS's existence. For each substantial paper in these volumes, data were collected regarding number of authors, type of affiliation of each author, author's gender, and author's country if it was not the United States. Also noted were data on length, content, and “colonicity” of the title, and data on the extent of citing and self-citing in the paper. Findings are presented, and are compared with findings of other studies of JASIS and related publications. Based on this survey of JASIS, the literature of information science has grown exponentially, as would be expected in a new or developing discipline. Authorship has been growing even a little faster, because multiple authorship of information science papers has become much more common. Representation of authors from different countries has increased greatly. But, compared to various library journals, JASIS is not outstanding in either multiple authorship or degree of foreign representation. Individual authors, at least in JASIS, are increasingly likely to produce multiple papers; the extent, explanation, and significance of this phenomenon warrant further inquiry. The percentage of authors who are female has grown, but is higher in many related journals than it is in JASIS. Trends in the titling of papers suggest that writings have become more informative, but also considerably wordier. “Scholarliness” of papers has increased on the basis of a rapid rise in use of colons in titles. More importantly, scholarship has increased greatly on the basis of the disappearance of papers that lack citations and the exponential growth in the average number of references per paper. It appears that the field of information science underwent an important transition in authorship characteristics after the 1950s. The proportion of authors with academic affiliations has grown so large that other types of affiliations, although significant in the 1950s, are now hardly represented at all. Contributions by authors whose professional concerns are primarily with applied aspects of information science have thus become rarer. Such changes may have serious implications for information science and for JASIS, and deserve study.

Neuroscience and computing algorithms

Knowledge about how the brain processes information is expanding rapidly. Two examples from neuroscience systems are (1) the observation that shifts in chemical modulation markedly alter the intrinsic behavior of neural networks and (2) the identification of nested modules within the neocortex that are capable of integrating parallel distributed and hierarchical processes. These examples have not been fully examined from a computational perspective. Algorithms motivated by neuroscience are interesting, and their unusual properties may have implications for information science and the design of novel computing architectures.

Reading, looking and learning

The survey of aspects of reading research discusses reading styles, 'readability', and the influence of presentation on reading and comprehension. Consideration of these leads to the fundamental problems of how the mind and eye interact in visual processing of text. Some research on the psychology or reading is reviewed, and certain psycholinguistic models of the reading process are discussed. Text structure and content appears to influence comprehension and learning, and rele vant research on this, and the interaction of the reader with the text, is outlined. Reading strategies are discussed, and the possibilities of altering reading behaviour by increasing read ing speed or improving learning patterns are reviewed. Possible implications for information science of reading research are mentioned.

Variety generation—A reinterpretation of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, and its implications for information science

AbstractThe conventional interpretation of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication in relation to textual material is unduly restrictive and unhelpful. A reinterpretation which is based on the definition of new symbol sets, comprising approximately equally‐frequent strings of characters, is presented. It is shown to have wide applicability in computer‐processing of texts. Moreover, it provides a more general formalism for considering methods of representing, storing and retrieving the subject content of documents.