Edited by author 05-14-2001 12:06 AM
In general I thought this was a good paper that was well-written. Their results confirm what they were trying to show, which was that shrinkage improves information extraction performance generally. Also, they provide a sufficient level of detail such that if one wanted to replicate their work it would be easy to do so.

Even though they motivate the usage of shrinkage well, one issue that I had is that they mention twice that shrinkage is "provably optimal" under appropriate conditions, but do not (as far as I can tell) provide a reference or explanation (much less a proof) of its optimality.