Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Automata studies—a significant theoretical aspect of computer sci-
ence—can contribute an understanding of the primitive computational
operations possible on written language, also discovered independently
in information retrieval. Computational operations can be understood as
the writing, erasure, and substitution of symbols (Turing 1937; Herken
1995). Analogously for information retrieval from written documents,
operations can be reduced to sorting or partitioning, which can be gener-
ated from writing, erasure and substitution, and the substitution of one
symbol for another (Buckland and Plaunt 1994). The Boolean operators
AND, OR, and NOT, familiarly used in commercial and Internet informa-
tion retrieval systems, correspond to the primitive logical connectives,
3
themselves independently developed from the primarily iconic (rather
than notational) modes used for automata theory (Minsky 1967, x;
Warner 2001, 47-72). Different systems express Boolean operators as dif-
ferent commands, and the algorithms used in the experimental tradition
also derive from the primitive operations.
A Semantics for Retrieval from Full Text
Saussure's remark that “Everything in a given linguistic state should be
explicable by reference to a theory of syntagmas and a theory of associa-
tions” (Saussure 1916/1983, 135) can be developed to cover the transfor-
mations of meaning that result from algorithmic operations on language,
as well as the production of meaning; this possibility will be indicated
here. The associations or paradigm is understood in the strict sense of the
possibilities of occurrence in the syntagma. By algorithmically creating a
searchable description of a written document for full-text indexing, units
of the syntagma are detached from their particular syntagmatic occur-
rences and effectively released into the paradigm (the paradigm is con-
ceived as an analytic construct and
in absentia
). The level of granularity
into which the syntagma is cut and the units are detached can vary, but the
word, as a formal or pattern-based actualization of the word, has become
a dominant unit in practice and will be the minimal unit considered here.
Detaching units from the syntagma would cover a number of technically
differentiated approaches, including serial searching of written language.
Therefore, searching operates on the units detached from the syntagma,
in effect on units belonging to a particular paradigm or network of asso-
