The representation of whole texts is a major concern of the field known as information retrieval (IR), an importaunt aspect of which might more precisely be called 'document retrieval' (DR). The DR situation, with which we will be concerned, is, in general, the following: a. A user, recognizing an information need, presents to an IR mechanism (., a collection of texts, with a set of associated activities for representing, storing, matching, etc.) a request, based upon that need hoping that the mechanism will be able to satisfy that need. .
