adaptive word scoring

[Felix Lee <flee@teleport.com>]

so after using adaptive word scoring for a while, I've
decided that it's mostly useless.

say you're an avid fan of alt.sex.pictures.emacs.  the word
"gif" is fairly common and mostly neutral: you can't tell if
an article is interesting based on the word "gif".

however, adaptive scoring treats "gif" as significant in an
odd way.  if you kill a massive series of "vi pinup gif"s,
then adaptive scoring is going to reduce the score of "gif"
by an amount proportional to the number of articles you've
killed.  this significantly affects the score of those
really sexy emacs gifs.

ok, you could add "gif" to the ignored-word list, but this
is just one instance of a more general problem.

my current thoughts are:

- adaptive scoring should try to discover _useful_
  discriminants by comparing interesting v. uninteresting
  articles.  the ignored-word list should be unnecessary.

- rather than adjusting score by N for every article marked,
  marked articles should be assigned a score target, and
  adaptive-scoring elements should be adjusted to try to hit
  the target.

comments?  I'm not sure how to implement this, yet.
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