INSTRUCT: a teaching package for experimental methods in information retrieval. Part I. The users view

This paper describes INSTRUCT, an interactive computer program which has been developed as a teaching aid for use within schools of librarianship and information science. The program demonstrates some of the techniques that have been suggested for implementing document retrieval systems in the future, and currently runs on a search file that comprises 6,004 documents from the Library and Information Science Abstracts database. INSTRUCT has facilities for natural language query processing, including the use of a stop‐word list, a stemming algorithm and a fuzzy‐matching routine that allows the automatic identification of a range of word variants; the provision of ranked output using automatic term weighting and a nearest‐neighbour searching procedure; and automatic relevance feedback using probabilistic relevance weights. The program is menu‐driven and can be used by searchers with little or no user training.