NATURAL LANGUAGE

In one of his two letters published in the June issue of Journal of Documentation, Moss rightly draws attention to the confusion arising out of the casual use of terminology in the field of information storage and retrieval. Unfortunately he does not go far enough, for there is a great deal of sorting out to be done with regard to our understanding of what we are talking about when we discuss languages, vocabularies, etc. before we start assigning names to the concepts which emerge. Moss's suggested terms are no more helpful in connoting the attributes of the things we are trying to isolate than those which he criticizes, and Bhatta-charyya's reply (published with ref. 1) is a poor argument for retaining expressions which are clearly unsatisfactory. Leaving aside the problems arising out of retrieval of texts using such terminology, we have difficulty in knowing what authors are talking about when we read such documents, and the context and explanations in the text have to be used to enable us to appreciate what is being discussed. Bhattacharyya has had two papers published quite recently in which such lack of clarity appears, the first being that on 'natural language', of which Moss is critical, the other that on 'explicit relations'.