For the students, the help system knows what Language and Teachpacks are
in use, possibly what modules are in use, and maybe even what HtDP
assignment is being worked on.
There are a few additional techniques that might improve relevance
ranking and recall for this purpose:
* TFIDF to focus on the most information-carrying terms.
* Application-specific synonym dictionary that you could come up with
yourself pretty easily.
* General synonym dictionary, such as from WordNet.
* Latent Semantic Indexing.
Some presentation tweaks might help too. Perhaps a tabular listing,
with sortable columns as a kind of interactive query refinement. Though
that would be more for non-student developers who have a larger search
space.
Neil
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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