Information Retrieval in the Business Environment

Abstract

This paper outlines a possible approach to the use of advanced information storage and retrieval techniques for business correspondence. The present situation in the Office Automation field is surveyed, and the role of information retrieval is an integrated office information system is discussed. Business letter characteristics that might be useful for analysis and retrieval are described. The idea of a generalized business thesaurus containing standard phrases and locutions as well as synonyms and index phrases is presented. A technical solution to the analysis, storage and retrieval of business letters based on the concepts from the SMART-system is outlined. A description of the experiments performed so far follows. These include decomposition, analysis, storage, automatic classification and utilization of inter-letter references. The results from the experiments show that the use of automatic indexing and retrieval in the office is feasible and provides a viable alternative to existing manual business files. In conclusion, several future experiments are outlined.