Abstract
One of the crowning achievements of Yaacov Choueka’s illustrious career has been his guidance of the Bar-Ilan Responsa project from a fledgling research project to a major enterprise awarded the Israel Prize in 2008. Much of the early work on the Responsa project ultimately proved to be foundational in the now burgeoning area of information retrieval, the science of searching large digitized corpora for information. In this paper, I will very briefly review some of the project’s achievements and will discuss some of the directions the project might consider in order to meet ongoing challenges. (The reader wishing to read an insider’s detailed review of the project’s achievements and challenges is referred to (Choueka 1990).)
The Responsa project was initiated by Aviezri Fraenkel in 1963, well before massive searchable text corpora became commonplace. In order to appreciate the challenges faced by researchers involved with the Responsa project in those early days, it is instructive to compare the corpus to the most well-known corpus extant at the time, namely, the Brown corpus developed at Brown University (Kucera & Francis 1967).
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Koppel, M. (2014). The Responsa Project: Some Promising Future Directions. In: Dershowitz, N., Nissan, E. (eds) Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8002. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45324-3_1
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