On Jul 10, 2009, at 9:27 AM, Weinheimer Jim wrote:
> While the catalogers don't read the books they catalog, neither do
> the computers, which can't "read" but only ingest text. So in this
> sense, Google is not:
>
>> "Use algorithms, including the full text of books, to guess which
>> books are about fish."
Computers may only ingest texts, but computer programs can
statistically analyze texts, and through such analysis draw
conclusions about said texts. This is what relevancy ranking is all
about, and is the sort of thing that has made Google (and information
retrieval techniques) so useful. These same techniques can be applied
to description of books and their "aboutness". I wrote a gentle
introduction to this topic:
http://tinyurl.com/n8k6bd
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Fri Jul 10 2009 - 09:53:52 EDT