[KLUG Members] Match-making data types and algorithms

[Peter Buxton]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 11:10:54AM -0700, Scott Wood was only 
   escaped alone to tell thee:

> The point being that for the various things I am looking to use something
> like this on, there are multiple categories of relevant data that I would
> like to create a result from with some sort of ranking for the closest,
> next closest and so forth and to have the various categories be weighted
> or at least weightable.  (i.e. search for something related to 'cars'
> would weight "content LIKE '%cars%'" while looking for sarcastic snippets
> about government might equally weight "style LIKE '%sarcastic%' AND
> description = 'sarcasm'".

Whoa. ;)

You're treading into philosophical waters there, my friend. Value judgements
are notoriously resistant to analysis.

Instead of arbitrary unipole goals like 'sarcasm', you might wish to scale
things on more abstract values. For instance, sarcasm is one form (reversed)
of 'sincerity' in 'humor'. Perhaps the middle of that goal is everyday
speech (neither highly sincere nor insincere) and the far end is
'worshipful'.