A natural language information retrievel system

The problem of natural language information retrieval is difficult because of vocabulary size, semantics, and syntax. For some specialized disciplines, in particular tissue pathology, vocabularies are limited, semantic problems largely disappear, and syntactic structure can be replaced by a much simpler structure. Experience with the language of surgical pathology is given, also an outline of an automatic data processing system applied to the problem. A considerably expanded system, for dealing with larger data bases and larger varieties of queries, is being designed.