Structured elements are pervasive in digital libraries, product catalogs, scientific data collections and on the Internet. One of our research aims is to investigate the ways in which the additional structure of a collection can be brought to bear on retrieval effectiveness. This paper reports on our experiments on the use of manually assigned keywords in domain specific collections; on the use...

This paper presents a new methodology for building special-purpose software agents that capture and access information in large, heterogeneous, distributed information environments. It allows rapid prototyping of information agents for solving a wide range of retrieval tasks with guarantees on performance. The key idea is to exploit underlying structure at various levels of granularity to build...

Standard economic theories of the firm (and other organizations) stress profit maximization as the foundation for derivation of predictable behavior. Yet statistical and case-study evidence continues to accumulate that real firms do not act as required by the neoclassical framework. Instead of being represented by ever more elaborate maximization models, the firm can be modeled simply as a netw...

This paper discusses and evaluates different approaches to the nuclear stress (NS) algorithm in light of the variability in stress pattern observed for certain constructions in German and English in wide focus contexts (“unmarked” stress patterns), in opposition to the rigid (right-most) nature of NS in Spanish/Italian. The paper also briefly discusses the case of nuclear stress in narrow focus...

The organization of information within science can be investigated in a principled way through analysis of science language. The restricted use of language in science enables description of the informational structure of science and of particular subfields, with strong similarities to structures in mathematics and programming languages. This result rests on decades of research into the relation...

This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of F...

Focus projection has attracted a number of structural analyses. But there are cases where focus projection depends on the context. This paper presents an analysis that directly refers to a property of information structure and is able to predict contextual effects on focus projection.

Emergence is a central organizing concept for the understanding of complex systems. Under the manifold mathematical notions that have been introduced to characterize emergence, the information-theoretic are of particular interest since they provide a quantitative and transparent approach and generalize beyond the immediate scope at hand. We discuss approaches to characterize emergence using inf...