Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.uu.net
From: amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Re^2: In Moderation
Message-ID: <1158@intercon.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jul 89 15:35:37 GMT
References: <383@wang.UUCP> <24A91A67.28396@ateng.com> <3300@epimass.EPI.COM> <197600001@inmet> <14403@bfmny0.UUCP> <3749@viscous.sco.COM> <29-Jun-89.175917@192.41.214.248> <24AF7C38.8967@ateng.com>
Sender: news@intercon.UUCP
Reply-To: amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation
Lines: 24

In article <383@wang.UUCP>, fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald ms 019 890) writes:
> how about assigning your corps of crack moderators to giving
> articles good, usable, machine-readable keywords instead of just giving
> them a thumbs-up/thumbs down?

Hey, Brad, are you out here :-)?

There are people who are looking at this approach, both with humans and
with software.  However, as anyone who has used commercial keyword-based
text retrieval systems can tell you, even professional keyworders (? is
that a word :-)?) aren't all that good at it, and even in limited domains
the number of keywords necessary to do a reasonable job becomes huge.  Ever
see a printed copy of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings--used for keyword-based
searching of the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE databases)?  It's
a book a couple of inches thick printed in fine print.  Granted, Usenet
wouldn't need anything that rigorous, and keywording of some sort could
make Usenet more tractable to automated filtering, but I still think that
Geoff's service has its advantages.

--
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
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