A Parallel Computing Approach to Creating Engineering Concept Spaces for Retrieval: The Illinios Digital Library Initiative Project

Chen, Hsinchun and Schatz, Bruce R. and Ng, Tobun Dorbin and Martinez, Joanne and Kirchhoff, Amy and Lin, Chienting (1996) A Parallel Computing Approach to Creating Engineering Concept Spaces for Retrieval: The Illinios Digital Library Initiative Project. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Special Section on Digital Libraries: Representation and Retrieval 18(8):pp. 771-782.

Abstract

This research presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Using a variation of the automatic thesaurus generation techniques, to which we refer as the concept space approach, we aimed to create graphs of domain-specific concepts (terms) and their weighted co-occurrence relationships for all major engineering domains. Merging these concept spaces and providing traversal paths across different concept spaces could potentially help alleviate the vocabulary (difference) problem evident in large-scale information retrieval. We have experimented previously with such a technique for a smaller molecular biology domain (Worm Community System, with 10+ MBs of document collection) with encouraging results.