i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Something mentioned in passing near the end of today's lecture reminded me of something I saw demonstrated at an Apple keynote a decade or so ago. The code name was V-Twin (technically the Apple Information Access Toolkit); it allowed you to paste in text and then use a slider to whittle down the text all the way to "key terms". It even showed the results live as you moved the slider -- pretty cool.

The magic behind it? Just what we've been learning: tf, idf, dimensionality reduction... .

Posting this as "Helter Skelter" is blasting in a very end-of-semester way, so I'll throw up some links that are way too techical for me:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/O...

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.56.1916

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.04/UsingAIAT/index.htm...

There's also a PDF from ACM on the topic (attached).