USE OF A TECHNICAL WORD ASSOCIATION TEST IN THE PREPARATION OF A THESAURUS

In the current revision of an information retrieval system at the Naval Propellant Plant, terms representative of the literature of propellant technology were collected. We found that the majority of the terms fell into five basic categories, namely: fields, objects, processes, properties, and substances. These categories are being worked out for synonyms, hierarchical incorporation, and so on. The resulting list will constitute a technical thesaurus. In addition, we plan to include for each term in the thesaurus an association list of related terms that appear in other parts of the thesaurus. This list will be similar to the related terms in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' thesaurus or most ‘see also's’ of the conventional catalogue.