YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

TEXT MINING
1. INtRODUCtION
the growth of electronically available information on the Internet has
been enormous and is still increasing. In february 2006, the Google search
engine offered access to more than 25 billion web pages. Eight years before,
the igures were relatively low, with about 320 million pages.
In its introduction, the EUR-Lex website currently mentions about 1.8 million
documents in various languages which are accessible via this portal. In
2005, which was supposed to be a quiet year, more than 2 100 regulations
were adopted in European legislation which meant over 44 000 new documents
in EUR-Lex. Although these amounts seem relatively small in comparison
with the igures on the Internet, a human client of the EUR-Lex system will
be lost without an eficient support from corresponding electronic information
retrieval systems.
Nevertheless, it has to be underlined that, since computers irst started to
store and retrieve information, individuals have been confronted with more
and more information items. thanks to information technology research, retrieval
methodologies have become more and more sophisticated and offered
easier and better possibilities for information retrieval.
It is today certainly understandable that users of information retrieval systems
are very demanding about the quality of the results, and no longer by the
quantity. what is the advantage when a search engine on the web confronts a
user with millions of hits? Sometimes it helps if the retrieval parameters are
reformulated; Boolean operators may also help to exclude some websites or at
least to determine which kind of answer its a given request better. In many
cases, however, this will not necessarily reduce the number of answers, but
will perhaps place the most relevant answers on top of the list. however, this
is not really an improvement of the retrieval result.
Another problem in the same context is that accessible systems or portals
are so complicated that users do not necessarily have the knowledge and experience
to make the engines extract relevant data. this can be supported by the
HOLGER BAGOLA
Head of the Formats
and Linguistic Tools Section,
Publications Office
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