A highly associative document retrieval system

Abstract This paper describes a document retrieval system implemented with a subset of the medical literature. With the exception of the development of a negative dictionary, all system operations are completely automatic. Introduced are methods for computation of term‐term association factors, indexing, assignment of term‐document relevance values, and computations for recall and relevance. High weights are provided for low‐frequency terms, and retrieval is performed directly from highly connected term‐document files without elaboration. Recall and relevance are based on quantitative internal system computations, and results are compared with user evaluations.