The use of statistical ranking to retrieve records from a gigabyte of text

In February Online Review published a Letter to the Editor from Cyril Cleverdon. This letter was written in response to Roger Summit's paper ‘In search of the elusive end user’, which was presented at the Eusidic Conference in October 1989 and published in Online Review in December. Mr Cleverdon drew particular attention to the results of tests showing the practical feasibility of statistical ranking techniques reported by Harman and Candela in a soon to be published paper. This is a summary of that paper, the complete version of which will be published in October 1990 as ‘Retrieving records from a gigabyte of text on a minicomputer using statistical ranking’, in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science.