Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version VT1.00C 11/1/84; site vortex.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!vortex!lauren
From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: netnews and keywords
Message-ID: <591@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 18:22:11 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.591
Posted: Thu Mar  7 18:22:11 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 08:43:52 EST
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 40

While I personally am not in favor of keyword-based netnews, I might
point out that Chuqui's calculations are based on a somewhat erroneous 
keyword model.  The "right" way of designing keyword-based systems is not
necessarily to store keywords for each article item, but rather to
have a list of keywords and store the item numbers that correspond to
each keyword.

For example, Stanford's newswire scanning program ("NS") makes
EVERY word in EVERY newswire item (except for a list of "common"
words that are automatically excluded from the tables) a keyword.
You then pick out individual stories with boolean keyword
expressions.  A randomly selected example:

((love+sex)*handcuff)-chuqui)

This expression would find all stories that mention
the words "love" OR "sex" that also mention the word "handcuff".
Also, it will exclude all stories that fit this critera but
that also include the word "chuqui".  

The software automatically tries to handle plurals and 
special suffixes.  There are some problems with this keyword
technique, admittedly.  You can't currently specify that two
words should be next to each other in a story.  And you still
tend to get lots of erroneous keyword matches that aren't
what you are looking for due to the strange places that some words
tend to pop up in stories.  Still, it is pretty useful, *if* you
are good at picking the keywords to put into the search
expressions.  This is something of an art, however, and is not
easily mastered.  If you do it wrong, you can miss many
interesting stories.

Of course, this is a pretty big program and the database is still
non-trivial, to say the least.  But frankly, I don't think that
systems based on users' selecting their own keywords will be
useful in our environment.  The technique above is an alternative,
but probably not practical for smaller machines.  So, I currently
feel that keyword-based news is not really the way to go.

--Lauren--