In information retrieval, genre classification could enable users to sort search results according to their immediate interests. People who go into a bookstore or library are not usually looking simply for information about a particular topic, but rather have requirements of genre as well: they are looking for scholarly articles about hypnotism, novels about the French Revolution, editorials about the supercollider, and so forth. If genre classification is so useful, why hasn't it figured much in computational linguistics before now? One important reason is that, up to now, the digitized corpora and collections which are the subject of much.
