An analysis of the latent semantic indexing retrieval system

In this thesis, a study and analysis of the effectiveness of the Latent Semantic Indexing Retrieval System (LSIRS) is presented. Using a Motif-based X-Windows application, LSIRS uses the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of the associated term-document matrices to perform document retrieval. The LSIRS user interface was initial prototype graphical user interface (GUI) of the recently developed XLSI application. The indexing and SVD software used to employ Latent Semantic Indexing (or LSI) was developed at Bellcore and the University of Tennessee. Based on data collected from the usage of the system by graduate students and University of Tennessee library patrons, LSIRS is shown to be an effective and useful document retrieval system for both the inexperienced and advanced user. However, as no software application is perfect, suggestions for future system improvements are described.