April 24, 2025

The ISR code is now packaged with the Mumps Language code. The Mumps distro (see below) contains the ISR code and a small subset of the OHSUMED database. A link to the full database is given below. The OHSU database used in these experiments is now contained in the Mumps distro.

• ISR Book: Implementing Information Retrieval Algorithms Using Mumps
• Click Here for Mumps & ISR source code distribution
• The OHSU Medline database used in these experiments was obtained from:

  trec.nist.gov/data/t9_filtering.html

  and reformatted.

  The following notes apply (see web site above for full discussion):

• "... The OHSUMED test collection is a set of 348,566 references from MEDLINE, the on-line medical information database, consisting of titles and/or abstracts from 270 medical journals over a five-year period (1987-1991). The available fields are title, abstract, MeSH indexing terms, author, source, and publication type. The National Library of Medicine has agreed to make the MEDLINE references in the test database available for experimentation, restricted to the following conditions:

  1. The data will not be used in any non-experimental clinical, library, or other setting.
  2. Any human users of the data will explicitly be told that the data is incomplete and out-of-date.

  The OHSUMED document collection was obtained by William Hersh (hersh@OHSU.EDU) and colleagues for the experiments described in the papers below:

  Hersh WR, Buckley C, Leone TJ, Hickam DH, OHSUMED: An interactive retrieval evaluation and new large test collection for research, Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, 1994, 192-201.

  Hersh WR, Hickam DH, Use of a multi-application computer workstation in a clinical setting, Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 1994, 82: 382-389. ..."

• Example Output
• Slides for Providence College Talk

The purpose of this document is to introduce a collection of programs to be found in the Vector Space ISR Workbench.

The workbench presently consists of about fifty modular programs written in Mumps and/or bash script. These programs implement the basic Vector Space Model for document classification and retrieval as originally developed by G. Salton [Salton, 1968, 1983, 1988, 1992] and others. Also included is a collection of approximately 294,000 medical abstracts for testing and experiments.

The purpose of this package is to facilitate teaching, exploration and experimentation with the vector space model and the development of new algorithms and techniques. The modular design of the code together with the Mumps multidimensional database model enable the user to experiment, augment, and measure various indexing strategies.

Currently, the package contains programs that perform:

1. word frequency analysis,
2. stop list generation,
3. word stemming,
4. term weighting,
5. synonym detection,
6. phrase identification,
7. term clustering,
8. document clustering,
9. document hyper-clustering, and
10. several retrieval methods.

1. document-term matrix,
2. term-document matrix,
3. term-term matrix,
4. document-document matrix,
5. dictionary vectors giving:
   
   1. word frequency,
   2. document frequency,
   3. Zipf's Law coefficients,
   4. inverse document frequency weights [Salton 1968] and
   5. discrimination coefficients [Willet 1985].

1. term phrases,
2. term cohesion,
3. proximity weighted term similarities,
4. term clusters.
5. document clusters and
6. clusters of document clusters.

1. simple sequential searches,
2. inverted file searches and
3. weighted inverted file searches using document similarity metrics such as Cosine [Salton 1983].

1. controlled vocabularies such as MeSH,
2. KWIC/KWOC indices,
3. n-grams [Manning 1999] and
4. Soundex codes [US National Archives, 2007].

Most of the code in these modules is written in Mumps, a language developed in medicine in the late 1960s [Barnett 1970, Bowie 1976, O'Kane 2008] which supports a string handling and a multidimensional database model which is ideally suited for vector space model implementations. The Mumps modules are invoked by bash scripts which control flow of data and multitasking.

The Mumps interpreter software used in these experiments are available for free download (GPL License) at:

References

[Salton 1968] Salton, G., Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval, McGraw Hill (New York, 1968).

[Salton 1971] Salton, G, ed.; The SMART Retrieval System, Experiments in Automatic Document Processing, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971).

[Salton 1983] Salton, G.; and McGill, M.J., Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw Hill; (New York, 1983).

[Salton 1988] Salton, G., Automatic Text Processing, Addison-Wesley (Reading, 1988).

[Salton 1992] Salton, G., The state of retrieval system evaluation, Information Processing & Management, Vol 28 No 4, pp. 441-449 (1992).

[NIST 2000] National Institute of Standards and Technology, Text Retrieval Conference 9 https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec9/t9_proceedings.html

[Willet 1985] Willett, P., An algorithm for calculation of exact term discrimination vales, Information Processing and Management, Vol 21, No. 3, pp 225-232 (1985).

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