MONO91 Other Potentially Related Research chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards Hughes provides, as of September, 1962 ([284]), a critical review of several experimental and proposed question-answering systems using natural language statements and natural language queries, including "BASEBALL", 1/ "SAD SAM" 2/ and the "Proto Synthex" investigations of System Development Corporation. Later developments on the Synthex (synthesis of complex verbal material) project at SDC have included a variation on a natural language text searching program where ordinary text input is run against an exclusion list and a table is set up to tally the substantive words remaining. Words with the same roots or previously having been identified as synonymous are cross- referenced. A complete index results, with document location identifier tags for the word occurrences down to the single sentence level. This index can be used subsequently to locate regions of text (volume, chapter, paragraph, and sentence) where answers responsive to input questions are likely to be found. It is proposed that the Synthex system eventually should incorporate analyses of syntactic and semantic relationships in the linguistic expressions of both queries and text. Of future interest in the extension of such considerations to automat[OCRerr]c indexing and abstracting are the following comments: "The results of several early experiments within the project, coupled w[OCRerr]th the findings of other language researchers, led to the following conclusions about meaning and grammatical structure in English text: 1. The degree of synonymity in meaning between any two English words can be measured quantitatively with a synonym dictionary and relatively simple scoring procedures. 2. The difference in meaning between two sentences of identical syntactic structure can be expressed quantitatively as a function of synonymity of their words..." 4/ It is also of interest to note that although the "indexer" program of the Synthex system provides cross-referencing between, for example, "whales" and "whaling" or "England" and "Great Britain", the investigators admit that: "naturally it falls short of such complicated cross-referencing as `mouse-animal' `Jones person' and other concept recognitions." 5/ However, concept recognitions based upon both a priori and 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ See also Green et al, 1961 [238]. See also Lindsay, 1960 [363 ] See also Klein and Simmons, 1961 [325 j; Simmons et al [552]to [555]. System Development Corporation, 1962 [590]. Simmons and McConlogue, 1962 [ 555 [OCRerr] , p.70. 138