InR)rmation Retrieval Research at the National Library of Medicine Donna Williamson The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has a long history of research in information retrieval. The MEDI..ARS computerized database was one of the first large-scale applications of computerized searching of a manually-indexed, inverted file system. The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications was established in 1968 as the research arm of the National Library of Medicine. One of the lirst results was MEDLINE (MEDLARS Online) in 1971. Today MEDLINE is used for approximately one-half of all online searches in science and technology in this country. Seventeen other databases are also online. Current research at NLM, both in the Lister Hill Center, and in other areas, is involved in areas such as expert systems, computer-aid medical instruction, digitization of printed page images, and information retrieval. Five of the projects in information retrieval are briefly discussed in this article. Natural Language User Interfaces for Information Retrieval Tamas E. Doszkocs Natural language query specification appears to be intuitively desirable for end user oriented subject searching in large interdisciplinary textual database domains. The CITE (Computerized Information Transfer in English) Research Project was initiated at NLM in 1979 with the main
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