Note: This page is historical.

Current pages about Yenta are here. Please look at those pages first.

Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead.

This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth.

Disadvantages of simple, keyboard-based matching in email comparison

When comparing a pair of email messages, a simple, keyword-based match, such as used in WAIS, helps a bit, but has disadvantages. In particular, it may tend to produce a rather jagged and uneven similarity landscape.

There are several reasons for this:

Synonyms will fail to match, because WAIS matches strings without regard to semantics. Thus, messages about "puppies" will never match messages about "dogs"---but they should.
Word sense will confuse the issue. For instance, the keyboard could mean a piano keyboard or a computer keyboard; keyword match cannot hope to grasp the distinction.

WAIS does not suffer so much from these problems in normal use, because it relies on users picking at least marginally descriptive search keys. In an application in which the search keys are successive words in email messages, however, this is not the case.

Lenny Foner

Last modified: Fri Dec 9 00:17:54 1994