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Dissertation Information for Sylvia E. Phillips

NAME:
- Sylvia E. Phillips

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Case Western Reserve University (USA) (1985)

ADVISORS:
- Phyllis A. Richmond

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Sarah Scott Gibson
- Richard L. Derr
- Donald K. Freedheim

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: An application of dictionary enrichment and propositional networking to the analysis of an original thesaurus constructed through standard methodology

Abstract: Libraries and information centers provide access to information which can answer questions posed by patrons. The quality of these answers can be improved if subject heading lists and thesauri offer the greatest number of alternative keywords.

The purpose of this study was to apply a philosophy to thesaurus construction known as "value-adding." Developed by Robert S. Taylor, this concept advocates that the output of an information system should differ in substance from the input. "Value-adding" was applied to two phases of thesaurus construction: homograph designation and term display. A method which was called "dictionary enrichment" was designed to add value to the homograph
designation, while "propositional networking" was developed for the term display.

Before applying the "value-added" processes, an original thesaurus was constructed according to the guidelines of the American National Standards Institute on the subject of "online searching." 505 journal articles were indexed exhaustively, and a mixed, expressive notation was developed for classifying the terms.

"Dictionary enrichment" was applied by randomly selecting ten singleword terms from the "online searching" thesaurus and consulting Webster's Third New Internatinal Unabridged Dictionary and locating all additional definitions which were not dialectic,
archaic, obsolete, or colloquial. Each of these definitions provided the basis for additional broad, narrow, and related term assignments. The fourth edition of Roget's International Thesaurus was also used to find additional relevant terms.

"Propositional networking" is a type of semantic network which represents the theory of human information processing in which humans do not store sentences or other groups of words in memory verbatim but only the concepts which they represent. The propositional network used in this study was developed by John R. Anderson and consists of seven steps which explained the procedures for connecting ellipses and nodes and for assigning syntactic functions such "relationship," "subject," "object," "agent," "action," "location," and "time."

Terms assigned through standcard thesaurus construction were compared with those supplied through dictionary enrichment. The dictionary enrichment process provided supplementary contexts for ninety percent of the terms examined. The assigned terms of the original thesaurus entries frequently provided a computer context, while the dictionary provided numerous others.

The propositional networking process was compared with three existing terminology displays: topical analysis, semantic road mapping, and arrowgraphing. The networks were able to preserve the hierarchical characteristics of Pettee's topical analysis and acknowledge associative relationships with less distance between the terms than the slashed lines.

Propositional networks provided syntactic instructions for combining related concepts which were absent in thearrowgraphs of Rolling. The networks were found to be more effective than Doyle's semantic road maps for displaying the most important conceptual words and not the extra prepositions and articles which might
not be remembered by a searcher.

MPACT Scores for Sylvia E. Phillips

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-04-09 14:43:33

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Students under Sylvia E. Phillips

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None