Associate Processing of Fragmentary Information

This paper describes the salient features of a Rome Air Development Center exploratory research effort aimed at developing new computer programs which can accomplish certain key processing functions on natural language text. The concept of an ultimate system includes a number of capabilities. First are those operations dealing with input and file search actions. Second are those operations that organize the output from the data handling system. In short, the system goal is to "cut out," automatically, the useful parts of each incoming document and then to "paste together" that cross section of document parts that forms the most relevant response to a particular file query. In addition to a description of the experimental computer programs developed thus far, two pilot studies are discussed. The first describes a test of the degree to which people could reconstitute the source documents from the fragments of three documents which were virtually identical in subject matter. The second pertains to a pilot test of some of the experimental computer programs already developed.