LANGUAGE AND CLASSIFICATION Available to Purchase

One of the least studied aspects of information retrieval is the relationship, on the linguistic plane, between the language of enquirers and the terms used by indexing systems. Much of the writing about system structure assumes that these are equivalent, that every enquirer is honest enough to call a spade a spade, and that the problems of designing descriptor languages for use in indexing he in the field of definition. This partly accounts for the sudden leap to fame of the thesaurus; for while a dictionary merely gives definitions of words one by one, a thesaurus, being slightly more refined, gives descriptive analyses in terms of synonyms and near‐synonyms, sometimes grouping them into sets based on some common characteristics.