I've got one word for you, Grant: Relevance.
-jake On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Grant Ingersoll <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I wanted to pick people's brains a little bit on the subject of determining > importance. This isn't necessarily Mahout related, although I think we have > some tools that help in the area. > > One of the emerging trends it seems these days with all our connectivity > and content is a notion of importance/priority. Some examples: > 1. Google now has "Priority Inbox" for instance and I think most would > agree that for things like Twitter and Facebook it would be really nice if > you could separate out the Important updates/people from the less important. > 2. Identifying important phrases, etc. in text across a corpus. > 3. One of the things I think most researchers do when exploring a new topic > is to identify the one or two seminal papers in the field, read them, and > then read the ones that cite those papers and so on. > 4. Take in all the day's news and figure out what the key articles are to > read (in some sense it's picking the most representative document in a > cluster) or that the article talking about raising Federal income taxes is > likely more important > than the one talking about raising local sales tax (or vice versa!) > 5. PageRank, TextRank, etc. and other approaches to calculating authority > > What I'm looking for is help in researching this area. Is there a name for > this (sub-)field (importance theory? prioritization theory?), particularly > in mach. learning and NLP that is geared towards this? I realize some > (most) of these problems can be solved with classifiers amongst other things > like graph algorithms (particularly ones that use the social graph), but it > also seems like the area is bigger than a particular implementation, so I > wanted to hear what others thought. How would you go about solving these > problems? Do you have any pointers to useful references on the subject > (theoretical or practical)? What other examples have you run up against? > > Thanks, > Grant
