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Playing detective with full text searching software

Authors:

Darrell R. Raymond,

Heather J. FawcettAuthors Info & Claims

SIGDOC '90: Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Systems documentation

Pages 157 - 166

https://doi.org/10.1145/97426.98005

Published: 01 September 1990 Publication History

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Abstract

Searching large text databases often resembles detective work. We explored this notion with an experiment in which subjects used powerful full text searching software to solve problems about the Arthur Conan Doyle story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The experiment was conducted in two parts: in the first part subjects attempted to teach themselves about the software using only the documentation; in the second part, subjects used the software to answer questions such as What brand of cigarette does Watson smoke? The experiment provided a great deal of feedback about the usability of the software and the documentation. Among the results that have wider implications are the need for better display of context, and a need for careful documentation of the characteristics of full text searching.

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Baeza-Yates R(1996)Visualization of large answers in text databasesProceedings of the workshop on Advanced visual interfaces10.1145/948449.948464(101-107)Online publication date: 27-May-1996
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/948449.948464
Raymond D(1991)Reading source codeProceedings of the 1991 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research10.5555/962111.962113(3-16)Online publication date: 28-Oct-1991
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/962111.962113

Index Terms

Playing detective with full text searching software
1. Applied computing
  1. Arts and humanities
  2. Document management and text processing
    1. Document management
      1. Text editing
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing

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Published In

SIGDOC '90: Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Systems documentation

September 1990

166 pages

ISBN:0897914147

DOI:10.1145/97426

Chairman:
John R. Talburt
Univ. of Arkansas at Little Rock, AR

ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation Volume 14, Issue 4
1990
154 pages
ISSN:0731-1001
DOI:10.1145/97435
Editors:
R. John Brockmann
Univ. of Delaware, Newark, DE
,
Nina Wishbow
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 1990

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Conference

SIGDOC90

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SIGDOC

SIGDOC90: 8th Annual Conference on Systems Documentation

October 31 - November 2, 1990

Arkansas, Little Rock, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

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Cited By

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Baeza-Yates R(1996)Visualization of large answers in text databasesProceedings of the workshop on Advanced visual interfaces10.1145/948449.948464(101-107)Online publication date: 27-May-1996
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/948449.948464
Raymond D(1991)Reading source codeProceedings of the 1991 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research10.5555/962111.962113(3-16)Online publication date: 28-Oct-1991
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/962111.962113

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