[nschiefer]

Most of your feedback is perfectly fair. My algorithm was not meant for general search, not am I a "young genius" or anything of the sort. Similarly, techniques like tf-idf, latent semantic analysis, document modelling, and even pseudo-relevance feedback expansion are no longer "cutting edge" techniques.

However, your blanket characterization that "there's absolutely nothing new" in my work and that I just talked "about existing research" while "making it look like [my] own" is somewhat offensive. Based on a fairly extensive review of the literature, the algorithm that I developed is novel and seems to outperform a number of these standard techniques on short document like tweets. As for "just looking at co-occurrence," that's essentially a type of pseudo-relevance feedback expansion and is, of course, well known and easy to implement.

Please realize the difference between a news interview published online and the paper I submitted to the fair when assessing the novelty of my work and when suggesting that I made no reference to others' work.

Regarding my "definition for a 'word'", I apologize for appearing pretentious. I was asked to speak on the conference's theme of "redefinition" in relation to my research and did the best I could.

Finally, I think it's kind of strange that you automatically assumed that my parents even worked on my project. Neither of them are even familiar with the details of the project. My work was my own, and your automatic assumption of what is tantamount of broad academic fraud and plagiarism assumed particularly bad faith. In any case, thanks for your honest feedback; I try to be careful about how I come across and I'll be even more mindful in the future.