Information retrieval tools for literary analysis

The advent of the CD-ROM as a means of distributing massive bodies of textual data increases the importance of developing automatic techniques for textual analysis. To accomplish this task, we should be alert to existing techniques, perhaps developed for other purposes, that can be of value. We here report on observations we made while carrying out research on information storage and retrieval that promise to be helpful. Specifically, auxiliary information and data structures created incidental to our IR investigations are rich in semantic content, and can be useful in suggesting or confirming relations among concepts in text. Two examples are given: one based on a term weighting scheme for IR, the other on a tree structure for compressing bitmaps.