i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Hello everybody,

Our promised 202 search tool is now available on bit.ly/202search

You can enter a query and the tool will perform 4 different searches against the corpus of 202 lecture slides. The search algorithms are:

Whoops, meant to post this when we were talking about LSA. As I mentioned in class, my mom's occasionally graded papers for various standardized testing services. She once mentioned to me that most of the guidelines for the human readers actually focused on structure, not content — things like, "Does this essay have a topic sentence? Are there supporting details?

A recent article from the BBC, "Great Writers 'Fail' Online Test" notes how famous literary pieces by the likes of Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway scored poorly when they were graded by computers. The article doesn't get into the complexities of analyzing the computer's grading system, but it does mention that the automatic grading system cannot pick up on human emotion and language subtleties.&#16