On the evaluation of LITREF: a PC-based information retrieval system to support stroke diagnosis

LITREF was developed to run on a microcomputer to support MAIESTRO, an expert system for the diagnosis and management of stroke cases. The architecture of LITREF uses an inverted file structure with a bitmap strategy. The evaluation process uses the cosine function to measure the similarity between a query and an abstract. The Salton interpolation process is used in the computation of recall and precision values. The experiment involves applying alternative suffixing algorithms to both index terms and query keywords. When the results are evaluated by comparing precision values at each recall level, it is found that the word-stem index method is superior to the full-word index method.<>