acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


News track


President's letter


ACM forum


The case against user interface consistency

Designers striving for user interface consistency can resemble Supreme Court justices trying to define pornography: each of us feels we know it when we see it, but people often disagree and a precise definition remains elusive …

A finite and real-time processor for natural language

People process natural language in real time and with very limited short-term memories. This article describes a computational architecture for syntactic performance that also requires fixed finite resources.

Impact of a restricted natural language interface on ease of learning and productivity

People process natural language in real time and with very limited short-term memories. This article describes a computational architecture for syntactic performance that also requires fixed finite resources.

Four paradigms of information systems development

Developing computer-based information systems necessarily involves making a number of implicit and explicit assumptions. The authors examine four different approaches to information systems development.

Results of the nineteenth ACM North American computer chess championship


An evaluation tool for measuring authoring system performance

A model for producing objective and precise measurements of the power and performance of authoring systems is described. An animation task is given as an example of the model's potential as a tool for evaluating authoring systems …

Practical performance of Bloom filters and parallel free-text searching

Bloom filter technique of hashing finds several applications, such as in efficient maintenance of differential files, space efficient storage of dictionaries, and parallel free-text searching. The performance of hash transformations …

Technical correspondence


The 1987—1988 Taulbee survey

The Computing Research Board's 1987-1988 Taulbee Survey includes the latest statistics on production and employment of Ph.D.'s and faculty in computer science and engineering. Included also are departments offering Ph.D.'s in …