(055) previous ~ index ~ next
To: Doug Oard <oard@glue.umd.edu>
From: George Doddington <doddington@nist.gov>
Subject: Re: TDT3 dry run
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 14:00:33 -0500
> From an efficiency standpoint, [cross-language document retreival is
> MUCH fast than MT]. And that's a big deal in real applications --
> you want to train your topic tracker to process in the language
> of the documents if you need to do high volume, and then only
> translate the documents that are detected.
Since you've made this assertion several times, I feel obliged to
respond, lest your comments infect the entire TDT community. You are
of course correct, but I would like to temper your perspective with
a couple of observations about the technology and the application:
* Progress has inevitable come from the existence of ever greater
amounts of processing power and memory, coupled with development
of techniques that exploit this power. To restrict research to
those ideas which are economical of this power is to ensure failure.
* TDT applications are generally of the type that process streams of
data in real time. This is unlike the typical document retrieval
applications which involve continually searching large and static
or accreting databases. Thus computer power is not as critically
important for TDT as it is for document retrieval, because the
volume of processing is limited by the source data rate.
--
George Doddington in McLean, VA: doddington@nist.gov or 703/556-3434
(055) previous ~ index ~ next
Last updated Thu May 13 09:28:21 1999