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Dissertation Information for Soonthorn Kaewlai

NAME:
- Soonthorn Kaewlai

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Case Western Reserve University (USA) (1978)

ADVISORS:
- Phyllis A. Richmond

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Conrad H. Rawski
- Burton V. Dean
- William M. Shaw Jr.

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: An Experiment in the Construction of a Systematic Author-Name File for Document Retrieval

Abstract: This experiment was designed to test

the assumption that subject searching

via authors' names as access points

would be equivalent to searching by

subjects. The ancillary problem dealt

with the method of organization of the

author-name file for serving this

purpose. It was conceived that the

file could be organized by grouping

authors' names and documents in groups

which were meaningful in terms of

subject content dealt with by

documents in the group. In other

words, each author's name was related

to other names in the file as a token

of authors' subject interests.

Incidences in the process of

communication among authors in

preparing certain documents prior to

publication were considered to reflect

authors' subject interests. these

incidences were evidenced by the

appearance of names called

Communication Data-- names of

collaborators, names of authors

acknowledged, names of authors whose

papers were referenced, and names of

authors who made reference to the

given papers. These data were used a

sAuthors' Descriptions to characterize

authors and their documents. Authors

of the given papers became members of

the same Author-name group if they had

some acceptable number of coincident

names in the Author's descriptions. An

overlapping clustering method was

employed for finding those Author-Name

Groups which were bases for building

the Systematic Author-Name File: In

this file, each author-name entry was

linked to a set of documents in group

form at each specified threshold. For

manual searching, the main entries

were arranged in alphabetical order.

From this, the search was performed

either by looking up a given author's

name of a document considered to be

relevant and retrieving a set of

related documents at a certain

threshold or by rotating a search,

based on the relevant document

retrieved, from one entry to another

until the result was satisfied.
The data base used in this experiment

comprised 800 documents in the field

of library and information
science previously used by Keen and

Digger in the Aberystwyth indexing

languages test. Relevance judgments,

queries, and some results obtained

from that study were employed for

testing and evaluation of the
Systematic Author-Name File. Forty

queries selected from Keen-Digger

study were used in the experiment.
The results showed that grouping

authors' names based On using

Communication Data was not quite

successful. A large numbet of authors'

names and documents
did not have sufficient data and were

unable to be gro~ped with others.

However, the analysis of the selected

Answer Sets (in which Author-Name

Groups were contained) revealed that

most Answer Sets contained the

acceptable document groups in terms of

probabili ty of being answer sets of

some querles. Though in some case the

Answer Set was not an acceptable

answer to the searched query, it was

found to be an acceptable answer of at

least one other query at best. In

comparing the results of the present

study with those of the Keen-Digger

study using an uncontrolled indexing

language with the same data base, both

were found to be comparable for the

special case where sufficient data

existed to try the author's name

method.
New ways of finding Author-Name Groups

as well
as application of the method in an

operational system
with real users were recommended for

further research.

MPACT Scores for Soonthorn Kaewlai

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:01:12

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