On Feb 19, 2011, at 11:26 AM, Cindy Harper wrote:

> I just was testing our discovery engine for any technical issues after a
> reboot. I was just using random single words, and one word I used was
> "correct".  Looking at the first ranked items, I wondered if there's some
> role for parts-of-speech in ranking hits - are nouns and , in this case,
> adjectives more indicative of aboutness than verbs?  The first items were
> "Miss Manners ...  excruciating correctly behavior", then a bunch of govdocs
> on "an act to correct....".  I don't think there's any reason to prefer
> nouns over verbs, but I thought I'd throw the thought at you anyway.



Ironically, I was playing with parts-of-speech (POS) analysis the other day. [1]

Using a pseudo-random sample of texts, I found there to be surprisingly similar POS usage between texts. With such similarity, I thought it would be difficult to use general POS as a means for ranking or sorting. On the other hand, specific POS may be useful. For example, Thoreau was dominated by first-person male pronouns but Austen was dominated by second person female pronouns.

I think there is something to be explored here.

[1] POS - http://bit.ly/hsxD2i

-- 
Eric "Still Counting Tweets and Chats" Morgan