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To: Hubert Jin <hjin@bbn.com>
From: David Graff <graff@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Question about chronological ordering of data
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 18:26:43 EDT
Hubert,
The reason I posted my question to the full group is that I wanted
to get some confirmation about what level of chronological ordering
is really needed.
My recollection is that there is no need to worry about chronological
order at the level of individual stories -- but since I didn't have a
definite record of that, I was hoping others could clarify the point.
You wrote just now:
> Since the stories are collected from several media sources, merge
> them in a chronologically order may be a little more complicated
> than just sort the bndtkn files (each one can be up to several
> hours of program covering more than a dozen stories).
>
> Here is an extreme example showing that we need an unique list of
> stories in the chronological order. For tracking using 1 stories,
> what if there are several media sources reporting the same story at
> the same time?
Well, since all stories have a "DATE_TIME" tag, putting them all in
strict chronological order (as opposed to file-sequential order) is
not all that complicated. It's just that I wasn't clear about
whether this was really called for.
I gather that people are generally treating the data on a
file-by-file basis, so the story sequence can simply be defined as
"stories in file 1, then stories in file 2, then..." etc. The fact
that "file N" and "file N+1" might actually overlap in terms of the
date and time that they were recorded is, as I understand it, a
relatively minor detail that can be ignored for the sake of
simplifying the research tasks in this project.
Am I wrong?
If so, someone here could generate a table that lists docnos in true
chronological order while I'm out of the office next week. (Robert
MacIntyre is on the tdt-distrib list, so he will be able to respond
to requests -- though he too will be out till Wednesday 5/29.)
Dave Graff
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Last updated Wed Sep 9 09:40:50 1998