[plt-dev] help

On Apr 17, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> For the students, the help system knows what Language and Teachpacks
> are in use, possibly what modules are in use, and maybe even what
> HtDP assignment is being worked on.
> 
> There are a few additional techniques that might improve relevance
> ranking and recall for this purpose:
> 
> * TFIDF to focus on the most information-carrying terms.

TFIDF would be suitable if we had a full-text index.  We don't -- the
search is using only index entries, so there is no different amounts
of information associated with various terms.


> * Application-specific synonym dictionary that you could come up
>   with yourself pretty easily.
> * General synonym dictionary, such as from WordNet.
> * Latent Semantic Indexing.

These are also all tools that would fit a full text search facility.
Doing that doesn't seem to me to be practical in javascript.  (We're
scratching the limits of browsers as it is, and as you've
experienced.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!