[R] Natural Language Processing of R help archives

Harsh
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:06:44 -0000

Hi useRs,
This is not so much a help request as it is a request for feedback about the
possibilities of using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on the
r-help archives for a more 'effective' retrieval of answers.
A few points that may capture what I'm trying to get at:

1) R has an emerging set of packages for NLP and text mining. Is it possible
to provide the r-help archives (for a certain period of course) as a text
corpus.
2) It is easy to search for R problems and get 'exact' results via
Google
search. rseek.org does a great job too. Would a semantic parser provide more
accurate results?
3) This effort probably falls under the Question-Answer modeling domain in
NLP, which is an area of application being used in chat automation,
chat-bots and to improve response prediction when a human interacts with a
query system.

I would like to use some of the NLP tool-kits available in Java and Python
with the r-help archive data and maybe create an application that uses
semantic filtering for query and search.

I'd appreciate knowing what others think about such an undertaking.

Thank you.
Regards,
Harsh Singhal

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