Alexander Johannesen wrote...
> I know several people here have said they don't think AI or smart
software is up to the task,
> and that they represent no real risk to serious cataloging. Well, I
can only say, please trust
> me in this! I worked in professional AI for over 7 years ; this stuff
not only can be done, but
> has been done for some time. Most AI problems have historically been
with access to various
> corpi to make them work, but those things are now changing
dramatically. Now that all books
> are written on computers and available for analysis, even more so.
> The reason this isn't in widespread use quite yet is because there
hasn't been much money in it,
> so it's been mostly an academic venture with lots of interesting but
underfunded projects that
> sits in a portfolio but never gets out of campus.
I'm sorry, but I just don't believe you.
Show us. Point us to these applications that can *currently* slurp in
250 pages of full text and return 5 to 7 reasonably good, controlled
vocabulary subject headings (or topics or topic maps or well-formed RDF
triples or what have you). Point to one *real world example* of this
happening -- not a lab, with pre-selected documents from a single topic
domain, or test runs against 5 paragraphs. This is *not* a trivial
task. To say that it is misapprehends the entire scope of what we're
talking about.
I also would respectfully disagree as to the potential market for such
an automatic-subject-assigning beast. There are a *lot* of corporate
records managers (and large records management companies) that would
love to offer their users a systematic list of what's in the archives.
For that matter, I don't doubt that there are a few folks working from
undisclosed locations in Virginia that would like a systematic list of
the subjects of web pages, emails, voice calls, etc.
To be sure, at *some* point AI will catch up. But it is hard to imagine
that the capabilities of such AI will be that far south of Reading and
Comprehending text itself. When we get to that point, I'll cheerfully
fire up my work avatar and let it write these posts for me...
Ed Sperr
Digital Services Consultant
NELINET, Inc.
153 Cordaville Rd. Suite 200 Southborough, MA
(508) 597-1931 | (800) 635-4638 x1931
Received on Thu Aug 30 2007 - 10:46:35 EDT