Z P R I S E I n f o r m a t i o n R e t r i e v a l S y s t e m This is an interactive tutorial designed to acquaint you with the ZPRISE information retrieval system by guiding you through some simple examples. In brief, ZPRISE allows you to search a very large collection of documents for those that are relevant to some topic of interest to you. You do this by formulating a query composed of words that are key to the topic of interest. When you ask ZPRISE to perform a search using your query, it finds the set of all documents which it believes are relevant to your query. This result set may be a very large, but you needn't look at all the documents in order to find those of interest to you, because ZPRISE tries to list the documents with the ones most likely to be relevant closest to the top. ZPRISE normally restricts the list it shows you to information on the top 24 documents from the latest search. The relevance of a document to a query is predicted based on several factors, among them: - how many of the query words also occur in the document, - how many times each such word appears in the document, - how often each query words appears in the collection as a whole, - and how long the document is. From the list 24 of document titles, ZPRISE allows you to choose any document and see its full text. You can also mark documents of interest to be remembered/saved. The following tutorial will lead you through some examples of the process of searching for, displaying, and remembering/saving documents using a collection of over 200000 articles (article = document) from the Financial Times of London during the years 1991 - 1994. Follow the instructions for the user (marked with ">>") and note the system's response. We will answer any questions that persist, but may do so by pointing you to places in the tutorial. ZPRISE is a research prototype that may occasionally fail or display an error message meant for system designers not users. If such an error message appears, simply click on the "OK" button to remove the message and continue. If the systems stops working altogether, let someone know and we will help you restart it. You cannot harm the system or the data in any way by using it. Help information is available for each window and can be displayed by clicking on the "Help" menu item in the upper right corner of each window. The help text will address more than is available in the version of the system you are using. To start the tutorial please turn to the next page. Initially you will see two windows. The upper one will have a title starting "PRISE ZClient". You will not need to use this window except to look at the white message area, which will show you information about what ZPRISE is doing and when it is "Ready" for your next request. It is normally best to wait for this "Ready" message before asking ZPRISE to do some additional work for you. The second window has the title "Query" and this is where you will type in the words or phrases describing the topic of interest to you. >> Use the mouse to move the pointer cursor into the field labeled "Keywords in document" within the Query window and then click once with the left mouse button. (ZPRISE only uses the left mouse button.) The frame of the "Keywords in document" field gets dark and a blinking vertical bar - the text cursor - appears in field to indicate where the next letter you type will appear. You can only enter text at the blinking vertical bar cursor. >> Assume you are interested in answering the following question: "What drugs have been used to treat asthma ?" You want to find and remember documents which, taken together, mention as many different asthma drugs as possible. If you save several documents that talk about some of the same drugs, it doesn't matter as long as the total set of documents you remember/save covers as many asthma drugs as possible. >> Type the following words in the "Keywords in document" field: drugs for the treatment of asthma If you make a mistake, you can use the backspace key or delete key to undo your error and start again. Moving the I-beam cursor to the position you want and clicking will change the location of the text cursor. >> Click on the "Perform search" button. The white message area changes temporarily to "Searching...", and below the Query window a new window appears: the Ranked Document List window appears. ZPRISE is creating a list of documents it believes are relevant to your query. This list is called a result set and information about the first 24 documents in the result set will appear in a light- colored rectangles in the Ranked Document List window. When the information for the first 24 documents is ready, the text "Displaying 24 documents out of 8467" near the top of the Ranked Document List window stops changing and the white message area near the upper left corner of the screen will change to "Ready". 8467 is the total number of documents in the collection that ZPRISE found relevant to your query. For each document ZPRISE displays several pieces of information in a rectangle with a light background. >> Locate each piece of information discussed below for the first title in the Ranked Document List window: The rank of the document in the current result set (or * if the document was remembered but is not in the current result set) 1 A document identifier and collection abbreviation FT923-8509 FT The date of the article/document 11 Aug 92 The title of the article/document (truncated) Technology: A bitter pill to swallow - Despite strides in ... The number of characters of data in the article/document 8432 A list of terms from the query, which were also found in the document. {asthma treatment drug} >> Notice that the list contains the term "drug" even though the query contains the word "drugs". This is because ZPRISE uses only the stem or root of a word when looking for matches between query words and document words. This means, for example, that you need not enter both singular and plural forms since either would be reduced to "drug" and would match stemmed form of "drug" or "drugs" in the document. Sometimes the stemmed form you see in the curly braces will not even be a real word. ZPRISE also changes all words to lowercase before comparing them. The order of words in the query makes no difference. >> Doubleclick anywhere within the first title rectangle. The white message area near the upper left corner screen will change briefly to "Requesting document..." as ZPRISE fetches the document text. The Document window appears to the right of the Query window and is filled with the text of the document on whose title information you doubleclicked. The text will look odd since it includes tags, e.g. , , etc., along with the text of the article. The rectangle you doubleclicked on becomes lighter in color to indicate this is the document being displayed in the Document window. >> Notice that some words in the document text appear white again a black background. Why ? (These are words from the query, which were also found in the document.) They may be helpful in finding relevant parts of a document. The Document window supports paging up or down through the document. >> Click once on the button marked "PgDn" (Page Down). >> Click once on the button marked "PgUp" to move in the other direction. >> Read the document to determine if it mentions asthma drugs. It mentions a family of drugs called "beta2-agonists bronchodilators" and a specific drug "Clenbuterol" is cited in the first page of data. >> In the Document window, click on the "PgDn" button to see another page-full of document text. How many times do you have to page down to find the name of another asthma drug ? It seems this is a document you should ask ZPRISE to remember. >> In the Ranked Document window, click once on the small square to the left of the title rectangle for the document you want ZPRISE to remember. A two item menu will appear - one item for "Remember", one in case you change your mind to "Undecided". >> Click once on "Remember ..." The menu disappears and an "R" appears in the small square to indicate ZPRISE is remembering this document. It will remember the document and keep its title information in the list even if you change your query so that the remembered document is no longer in the top 24 documents of the result set. NOTE: ZPRISE will forget all remembered documents if you exit ZPRISE or click on the "Stop search, clear results" button in the Query window. >> In the Document window, click once on the "NextDoc" button. ZPRISE displays the next document in the Ranked Document window and highlights the rectangle for this document in the Ranked Document window. At this point you have tried the basic functions in ZPRISE. Most of the other buttons are labeled so as to make their purpose clear. To find and save documents naming more asthma drugs, you could read more of the documents in the current result set and ask ZPRISE to remember the ones that mention additional drugs. You could modify your query and click on "Perform search" again to find more documents to be reviewed and possibly remembered. Adding words to the query will usually increase the number of documents ZPRISE finds relevant to your query and may change the composition and/or order of the top 24 documents which ZPRISE presents to you. >> Try adding the word "ventolin" to the query and see if the total number of documents found changes and/or the list of the top 24 documents. Ventolin is the name of an asthma drug mentioned by several of the articles identified by the first query. This concludes the tutorial.