A Highly Associative Document Retrieval System

This paper describes a document retrieval system implemented with a subset of the medical literature. With the exception of the development of a negative dictionary, all system operations are completely automatic. Introduced are methods for computation of term-term association factors, indexing, assignment of term-document relevance values, and computations for recall and relevance. High weights are provided for low-frequency terms, and retrieval is performed directly from highly connected term-document files without elaboration. Recall and relevance are based on quantitative internal system computations, and results are compared with user evaluations.