CompuServe Messages

#Encyclopedias?

    26-Oct-91 14:44:25
Sb: #14020-#Encyclopedias?
Fm: Jerry Isdale 72330,770
To: Roger Post 73766,413
The paper I read said the grad schoolers (3rd and 5th grade?) had trouble with the Booleans. Another paper suggested a real nice non-boolean way to get similar effects: Accept a Natural Language string, strip out stop words, stem the remaining and do search for each – effectivly a boolean OR. Then use a weighting scheme to rank the results. They claimed good results and great feedback from users. Some professional librarians, etc wanted full boolean too, just cause they were familiar with it. It wasnt that much more effective than the ranking system, and then only for those real familiar with boolean on-line searches. I've got code to implement the ranking system, but havent found a client willing to pay me to make it a decent usable CD system yet. (any takers? <Grin> Jerry. There is 1 Reply.