We hope that all readers will find the papers included in this volume of interest. All were presented at the 14th BCS IRSG Research Colloquium held at Lancaster University on 13th-14th April 1992. The papers display very well the scope and breadth of information retrieval, as indeed did the workshop ilself. They also present a good cross-section of current IR research, and as such provide a useful signpost for trends in information retrieval. Before we finish we must thank the following colleagues: Simon Botley, Paul Rayson and Paul Jones for their help in the organization of the conference. We would also like to extend a special message of thanks to Professor G.N. Leech of the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster and Roger Garside of the Department of Computing at Lancaster for their support during the conference period. Tony McEnery would also like to express his thanks and gratitude to Paul Baker for his help during the production of this book. September 1992 Tony McEnery Chris Paice Contents A Logical Model of Information Retrieval Based on Situation Theory M. La/mas and K. van Rijsbergen ........................................................ .

Inhalt

A Logical Model of Information Retrieval Based on Situation Theory.- Multilingual MenUSE - A Japanese Front-End for Searching English Language Databases and Vice Versa.- An Evaluation of Concept Translation Through Menu Navigation in the MenUSE Intermediary System.- ISIR: An Integrated System for Information Retrieval.- WING: An Intelligent Multimodal Interface for a MaterialsInformation System.- Dialogue Management in a Pragmatics-Based Natural Language Information System.- Performance Comparisons of Boolean and Ranked Output Retrieval.- Pictorial Information Systems - Prospects and Problems.- Modelling Online Database Systems in an Intelligent Interface.- A "Select and Generate" Approach to Automatic Abstracting.- Evaluation of Techniques for the Conflation of Modern and Seventeenth Century English Spelling.- Hypermedia Links and Information Retrieval.- Natural Language for Database Retrieval - A Practical Perspective.- Author Index.