ROBERT M. LOSEE School of Information and Library Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3360 U.S.A. Email: losee at unc dot edu Telephone: (919) 962-7150

Courses:

Spring 2009 -- INLS 490-40 -- What is Information (Seminar, Emphasis on Humans)
Spring 2009 -- INLS 509 -- Information Retrieval
Summer 2009 -- INLS 780 -- Research Methods
Fall 2009 -- INLS 509 -- Information Retrieval
Fall 2009 -- INLS 780 -- Research Methods
I recommend that MSIS students take INLS 509 & INLS 520 during their first semester.

Advising, Teaching, and Research areas

Most recent and most interesting published work below

• Decisions in Thesaurus Construction and Use, Information Processing & Management. 43 (4), 2007, 958-968. (published article). Continuing this work is "Vocabulary Conversion: Performance with Controlled and Uncontrolled Terms and Tags" UNC-CH SILS Technical Report TR-2008-02.
• Percent Perfect Performance (PPP), Information Processing & Management. 43 (4), 2007, 1020-1029. (published article)
• Is 1 Noun Worth 2 Adjectives? Measuring the Relative Feature Utility, Information Processing & Management. 42 (5) 2006, 1248-1259. (published article)
• Browsing Mixed Structured and Unstructured Data, Information Processing & Management. 42 (2) 2006, 440-452. (published article)
• Are 2 Document Clusters Better Than 1? The Cluster Performance Question for Information Retrieval, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 56 (1) 2005, 106-108. (published article). (Losee and Church)
• A Performance Model of the Length and Number of Subject Headings and Index Phrases, Knowledge Organization. 31 (4) (2004), 245-251.
• Information Retrieval with Distributed Databases: Analytic Models of Performance, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 15, 2004, 18-27. (Losee and Church)
• Adaptive Organization of Tabular Data for Display, Journal of Digital Information. 4 (1) April 2003. URL is http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-106/95
• Optimal User-Centered Knowledge Organization and Classification Systems: Using Non-Reflected Gray Codes, Journal of Digital Information. 2 (3) March 2002. URL is http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-49/50
• Term Dependence: A Basis for Luhn and Zipf Models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52 (12), pp. 1019-1025, 2001. (published article.)
• Natural Language Processing In Support of Decision-Making: Phrases and Part-of-Speech Tagging, Information Processing & Management, 37 (6), pp. 769-787, 2001. (published article.)
• When Information Retrieval Measures Agree about the Relative Quality of Document Rankings, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51 (9), pp. 834-840, 2000. (published article.) (Won JASIS Best Paper of the Year Award, 2000.)
• Measuring Search Engine Quality and Query Difficulty, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (10), pp. 882-889, 1999. (Losee & Paris) (published article.)
• Communication Defined as Complementary Informative Processes, Journal of Information, Communication, and Library Science, 5(3), pp 1-15: 1999.
• Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytic Models of Performance, Boston: Kluwer, 1998.
• Browsing Document Collections: Automatically Organizing Digital Libraries and Hypermedia using the Gray Code, Information Processing & Management, 33 (2), pp. 175-192, 1997. (published article.)
• A Discipline Independent Definition of Information, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (3), pp. 254-269, 1997. (published article) This work is based on a definition of information that I proposed in The Science of Information (Academic Press, 1990.) (Here's a related work on information as a measure of quality of databases, information systems, or libraries)
• Text Windows and Phrases Differing by Discipline, Location in Document, and Syntactic Structure, Information Processing & Management, 32 (6), pp. 747-767, 1996. (Here's a related work on migrating sublanguage terms in hard and soft sciences and here is the pdf full text of this article)
• Comparing Boolean and Probabilistic Information Retrieval Systems across Disciplines and Queries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48 (2), pp. 143-156, 1997. (published article)
• Learning Syntactic Rules and Tags with Genetic Algorithms for Information Retrieval and Filtering: An Empirical Basis for Grammatical Rules, Information Processing & Management, 32(2), pp. 185-197, 1996. (published article)
• Upper Bounds for Retrieval Performance and Their Use Measuring Performance and Generating Optimal Boolean Queries: Can it Get Any Better Than This? Information Processing & Management, 30(2), pp. 193-204, 1994.
• Term Dependence: Truncating the Bahadur Lazarsfeld Expansion, Information Processing & Management, 30(2), pp. 293-303, 1994. (published article)
• A Gray Code Based Ordering for Documents on Shelves: Classification for Browsing and Retrieval, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43(4), 312-322, 1992. (published article) (Here's a related work on browsing and classification in libraries)
• The Science of Information: Measurement and Applications, San Diego: Academic Press, 1990.
• Minimizing Information Overload: The Ranking of Electronic Messages, Journal of Information Science, 15(3), pp. 179-189, 1989.
• Integrating Boolean Queries in Conjunctive Normal Form with Probabilistic Retrieval Models, Information Processing & Management, 24(3), pp. 315-321, 1988. (Losee & Bookstein)
• Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Document Retrieval Models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(1), pp. 8-16, 1988. (Performance with different Bayesian Relevance Feedback techniques)