Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Decline of Text

Prof Marti Hearst recently has an essay on Edge talking about the decline of text. It is certainly the trend that speech/video will become more and more important, but does it mean the discipline of IR is going to be obsolete? I do not think so, because the essence of IR, in my opinion, is the statistical approach to processing and managing large amounts of information expressed in natural language. Therefore no matter the data are in text format or not, the need of IR is still there.

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