Xref: utzoo comp.ai:7956 comp.ai.edu:121 comp.ai.philosophy:288 comp.ai.neural-nets:2419 comp.edu:3769 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!unido!sbsvax!fb14vax!ak From: ak@fb14vax.cs.uni-sb.de (Alfred Kobsa) Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.edu,comp.ai.philosophy,comp.ai.neural-nets,comp.edu Subject: MAILSERVER FOR AI LITERATURE Keywords: bibliographic database, mail access, refer and LaTeX format Message-ID: <7452@sbsvax.cs.uni-sb.de> Date: 5 Nov 90 15:21:05 GMT Sender: news@sbsvax.cs.uni-sb.de Followup-To: poster Lines: 189 THE LIDO MAILSERVER FOR AI LITERATURE Version 2.0 A mail server has been developed at the Computer Science Department of the University of Saarbruecken which accesses a large database of bibliographic data of articles pertaining to the field of Artificial Intelligence. At the moment, this database contains more than 13.000 articles, which can be retrieved via electronic mail. The result will be returned either in LaTeX (Bibtex) format or in a Refer-like format. This mail server is a "by-product" of the bibliographic information system LIDO which is currently under development at the University of Saarbruecken. The following people are involved in this project: Coordination: Alfred Kobsa Hacker: Monika Klar Alfred Kobsa Peter Schwarz Wizards: Gerd Herzog Clemens Huwig Mail-Freak: Roman Jansen-Winkeln Data Input: Christa Weinen Gisela Veit The LIDO MAILSERVER is partly based on the UNIX refer system. Queries to the bibliographic database are restricted to the names of the author(s), the title, and the year of publication. Users may select between full word search (fast, since index-based; hence prioritized processing) and substring search with optional regular expressions. Global search with key words is *not* possible. Users who already have a certain overview of a field will thus probably profit more from the LIDO MAILSERVER than novices familiarizing themselves with a new area. In order to keep the network and computer workload tolerable and to control erroneous queries, certain security limits have been introduced: 1. Not more than 150 articles may be retrieved per query, and not more than 500 per message. 2. Queries with the option `nosubstring' are handled with priority. Since LIDO is still under development, it cannot be distributed yet. However, the bibliographic data (3 MB at the moment) may be obtained on a license basis for a fee of U.S.$ 75.00-300.00 via ftp or on tape. Please understand that it is not possible for us to lend out or to copy articles which you retrieve in the bibliographic databases. If you find an error, please send a note to bib-1@cs.uni-sb.de. Messages to the LIDO MAILSERVER should be sent to lido@cs.uni-sb.de and should have the following format: a) Subject field: - First the key word `lidosearch'. - Then the desired format of the bibliographic data in the return message: `latex' (= Bibtex format) or `nolatex' (= refer-like format). The default is `nolatex'. - Then the form of retrieval: a) `nosubstring': Your search patterns (see below) must be full words. Your message will be handled with priority. b) `substring' (default): Your search patterns may be substrings. Regular expressions in the egrep notation (see Appendix) may be used as well. Plural forms and spelling variants can thereby be accounted for. - Then the language that should be used for comments and error messages in the return message: `english' or `deutsch' (default). b) Body of the Message: Each line of the body of the message contains one or more search patterns which may refer to the names of the authors, to words in the title, or to the year of publication. If a line contains more than one search pattern, only those articles are retrieved which match *all* patterns. German umlauts and the `scharfes s' should be transliterated as follows: A", O", U", a", o", u", s" Example 1: --------- mail lido@cs.uni-sb.de Subject: lidosearch latex nosubstring english wahlster generation kobsa models 1989 This message contains three different queries. In the first case, all articles are retrieved which contain the word `wahlster' as an author's name or as a word in the title. In the second case, the same applies to `generation'. In the third case, all articles are retrieved which contain both `kobsa' and `model' and 1985 (but not `models', since `nosubstring' was selected). The message will be handled with priority since `nosubstring' was chosen. The references in the return message will be in LaTeX (Bibtex) format, and error messages and comments will be in English. Example 2: --------- mail lido@cs.uni-sb.de Subject: lidosearch latex substring english kobs natu"rlichspr This message contains a single query only. All articles will be retrieved which contain both the substring `kobs' (like in `Kobsa' or `Jakobson') and the substring `natu"rlichspr'. The return message will come in LaTeX format, and error messages and comments will be in English. Example 3: --------- mail lido@cs.uni-sb.de Subject: lidosearch substring english morpholog(y|ie) modell?ing modell*ing model+ing ja[ck]obson \ matches the empty string at the end of a word. [_c_h_a_r_s] match any character in the given class; if the first character after [ is ^, match any character not in the given class; a range of characters may be specified by _f_i_r_s_t-_l_a_s_t; for example, \W (below) is equivalent to the class [^A-Za-z0-9] ( ) parentheses are used to override operator precedence. \_d_i_g_i_t \_n matches a repeat of the text matched earlier in the regexp by the subexpression inside the nth opening parenthesis. \ any special character may be preceded by abackslash to match it literally. (the following are for compatibility with GNU Emacs) \b matches the empty string at the edge of a word. \B matches the empty string if not at the edge of a word. \w matches word-constituent characters (letters & digits). \W matches characters that are not word-constituent. Operator precedence is (highest to lowest) ?, *, and +, con- catenation, and finally |. All other constructs are syntac- tically identical to normal characters. For the truly interested, the file dfa.c describes (and implements) the exact grammar understood by the parser.