MONO91 Other Potentially Related Research chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards providing for various normalizations that may be applied to compensate for word or sentence frequency factors. These devices differ from the earlier EDIAC in the variable weightings provided, in the normalizations that may be applied, and in multipath interconnections. When, for example, currents are applied at some of the word terminals, the volt- ages appearing on any of the other word terminals depend on the strengths of association between these words and the input words via all direct and indirect paths. The responses of sentence terminals to the input words of a query similarly depend upon how strongly a sentence is connected to these words and how strongly it is connected to other words which in turn are strongly connected to the query words. It is to be noted further that: "Pulling out or cutting a few randomly selected wires in an ACORN generally has a surprisingly small effect. . . This insensitivity is of course, explainable in terms of the multiplicity of indirect and redundant association paths which remain intact when a direct path is severed... It. . . sug;ests that the retrieval process can indeed be made insensitive to minor variations in indexing." 1/ In addition, there are intriguing possibilities for imposing a "viewpoint" with respect to a search by injecting bias currents. Thus if only non-"Air Force" jet plane items were desired, the "Air Force" items could in effect be grounded out. If there were no jet items in the collection other than those which were also Air Force items, these would be indicated as responsive, but largely they would appear only if this should be the case. Some words used have some connection to almost all other words, but these have little effect in the system and the hardware thus tends to compensate for the high frequencies of very general words. 6.2.5 Spiegel and Others at Mitre Corporation Bennett and Spiegel, reporting at the Symposium on Optimum Routing in Large Networks, IFIP Congress-1962, 2/ consider modifications to formulas for the calculation of statistical association factors which will normalize against such influences as frequency of word occurrences, relative word position within a string of words, and string length. This work has been carried forward at the Mitre Corporation in a program for developing procedures to encode various statistical properties of messages or documents and to use these codes for message routing and retrieval. Differences between this approach and those of Maron and Kuhns, Stiles, and Doyle, relate primarily to the questions of how best to normalize. The objective is closely similar: to use associational weighting so as to provide, in response to a query, output of documents or messages ranked in order of probable relevance to the query. 1/ 2/ Giuliano and Jones, 1962 [229[OCRerr], p. 22. See Juncosa, 1962 [306], especially paper 4, E. Bennett and J. Spiegel, "Document and message routing through communication content analysis", pp. 718-719. 126