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Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!peterr
From: peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley)
Newsgroups: net.cog-eng
Subject: Ways of referring to news articles
Message-ID: <2706@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 12-Nov-83 12:53:09 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.2706
Posted: Sat Nov 12 12:53:09 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Nov-83 18:55:07 EST
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 35

Though I can't give any references off-hand, I think it's been shown reasonably
well that people don't remember phrases (such as article titles) verbatim, but
interpreted according to their own knowledge.  Also, what is remembered is
subject to interference from the body of the article itself.  So while a
reader might remember most of a title, it might only be in terms of its
meaning, not the words used; thus I wouldn't have much hope for a
sentence-matching scheme, except for very short titles ("Grenada").
Even slightly longer titles are subject to transposition errors (e.g.
"Lebanon bombing", "Bombing in Lebanon") and minor interpretation
differences ("Bombing marines").
  Here are two ideas, tho:  a "note the title, article #, and first few
lines of the article I just read" command in readnews, which would dump
the information to a .followup file, which could be consulted when posting
a followup (in a manner similar to mail message printing).  This could
provide the necessary link between reading news and posting followups.
This scheme also has the advantage of providing a note-pad on which to record
messages you want to respond to (an incentive for use of the "note article"
command).
readnews -p could print article numbers.
  The other idea is to use keywords-within-groups, following the spirit
of suggested keyword news systems.  "Grenada", "Lebanon", "bombing", and
"marines", above, are all pretty good keywords.  Taking all the noise
words out of a title sentence to come up with a keyword list which could
then be compared against keywords supplied by a followupper might work.
A more explicit use of keywords (i.e. keywords supplied by the article
originator, or by analysis of a submitted article) would probably be better.
The keyword-oriented scheme has the advantage of the followupper being
allowed to generalize or specialize the discussion, by removing or adding
keywords to the set of keywords in the referenced article.  The discussion
on Grenada is one in which this would have been useful.  (e.g. moving from
{Grenada} to {Grenada,news} and {Grenada,airfield} to {Grenada,airfield,
British} to {British,US}).   Keyword systems have problems with synonyms
though.

  p. rowley, U. Toronto