Ottawa ACM SIGART

The quintessential Internet activity is to look for something. Sounds simple, but anyone who has done much searching in large collections of documents will tell you it can be harder than it might at first appear to be.

Dr. Delannoy draws on his experience as a designer of document and e-commerce applications to identify common factors involved in information search activities: reading techniques, goals and objectives, search strategies, and key aspects of the document. He will then speculate on the design of a system based on this model to provide intelligent assistance to the human searcher.

After the talk, interested parties can view live demonstrations of prototype search applications developed at RES International: Summer (text summarization), and ProdFind (WWW catalog pages).

JEAN-FRANCOIS DELANNOY is a knowledge engineer at RES International and a research associate and part-time teacher at the University of Ottawa. In doctoral studies at the University d'Aix-Marseille (1991) he implemented a prototype system to acquire knowledge from natural language NATO situation reports, and he remains interested in this subject and the larger field of understanding and communicating in written and visual images.

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• Richard Clark, Department of Justice, for the facility

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