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If the query comes from a student during office hours, or from a patron
at a reference librarian's desk, the QUERY LANGUAGE they'll use
to frame their question is all of NATURAL LANGUAGE, that most
expressive ``mother tongue'' familiar to both question-asker and
-answerer. But for the software search engines we will consider, we must
assume a much more constrained, ``artificial'' query language. Like
other languages, ours will have both a meaningful VOCABULARY --
the set of important keywords any users are allowed to mention in any of
their queries -- and a {\em syntax} that allows us to construct more
elaborate query structures.
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Elements of the query language