Edited by author 04-04-2001 12:25 AM
I agree, this seems like a neat and reasonable idea. The downfall of the paper is definitely the lack of results.

The main points of the paper seems to be that highly selective features can be built from combinations of basic features and that using a subset of highly selective features leads to better query performance than using basic features.

The authors do provide some evidence that highly selective features can be built from basic features. At least, they show that the new features are highly selective. It would have been nice to know how selective basic features are since we can't know that the new features are more selective without that information.

In order to demonstrate that query performance improved, the authors should have published the performance of basic features compared to second order features compared to third order highly selective features. This would have shown the benefit of using highly selective features.

However, my gut feel is that the authors are almost certainly right about both points, so this feels like a good idea, even if we don't have the evidence to back it up.