Slashdot Mirror
Paraphrasing Sentences With Software
prostoalex writes "Cornell University researchers are making progress in paraphrasing and "understanding" complete sentences in a software application. Analyzing sentences on the semantic level allows the software application to treat two sentences, expressing similar thoughts and ideas, but written in a different manner, as a single semantic unit. Significant achievements in this area could revolutionize the information searching field."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of this
I think that the first and best use of this technology would be to help the editors of Slashdot find duplicate articles!
Think about the possiblities...
Of course, the biggest problem with that is that there wouldn't be nearly as many cool articles to read!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
if these people get an "informative" when they paraphrase the article, they should be metamodded to "insightful"...
but the day the mods will be replaced by parsers, I think I'll get one to post instead of me.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'm too lazy to read the article.. could someone write some software to paraphrase it for me?
Finally, auto-translate, then auto-parse can rid us of these "manuals" :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Hello, automatic paraphrasing of literature.
P.S. Just joking, kids. Stay in school!
Let's see the srtwfaoe cut its tteeh anigist tihs lttilte puzzle! (blatant reference to an older article)
They should use this technology to transcribe legalese into plain English and back. Like, you feed it with "Due to unanticipated circumstances as listed under the terms of the clause 17(a), we may be unable to comply with your request within this and successive fiscal year(s)", and it spits out "bugger off".
Of course, millions of lawyers worldwide would lose their jobs, but I, being bitten by them, just take it as an added benefit.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
a "-1, redundant" generator.
The next generation of students sure will have it much easier than us. How is a teacher supposed to catch plagiarism with software like that?
Oh wait...
Mrs. G: Johnny, come here for a second.
Johnny: Yes Mrs. G?
Mrs. G: What did you mean by "Shrub claimed that Basket Hamper and the Hatchets of Sin will be blown out" in your current events report?
Johnny: Oh, whoops! What I meant to say there was, "Bush says Bin Laden and the Axes of Evil will be defeated." Sorry about that. Darn that defective spell-check and grammar-check!
Auto Greeter Machine: I welcome you to our country, and greet you with open arms. Please enjoy your stay - we have a fine range of tourist facilities, restaurants, bars and so forth. And on a personal note, may I say that you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
How do you paraphrase Slashdot ?
Ans : Dupes for nerds, stuff that matters again and again.
How do you paraphrase Microsoft Innovation ?
Ans :
getSexySig();
But could it understand bablefish translations.
There's this algorithm called Latent Semantic Analysis which has been under development for quite some time (freely available!). It's quite good at comparing the semantic content of 2 bits of speech based on its database of many thousands of book (in fact you can specify the education level by choosing different databases).
The output of LSA has been shown to be roughly equivalent to human scorers for examining summary essays produced in tests.
Point is, that by combining this here paraphrasing algorithm with LSA, we can have computers summarizing text and other computers giving them grades on it. This takes students and teachers out of the equation entirely. Saves us big bucks and get public education back on its feet!
"Pass me the crackpipe, man!"
Proudly karma-whoring since the turn of the millenium
Money for nothing, pix for free
An American friend of mine was terribly confused by the expression "Crash us a fag, mate".
As you've said, 10 years have passed, so they had to rename the project to BARELYLEGAL
Another area in which the world is poorer for the lack of a Douglas Adams wandering (or more likely flying first class) around it.
I would have LOVED to see him tackle a 'text message adventure' along the lines of the old infocom classics. He has written a number of pieces (some of which are collected in salmon of doubt) about how much he enjoyed this marrage of writing and computing. The flexibility and restrictions of the medium would have led to something pretty neat I'm guessing. Of course - then he'd have pissed another 10 years down the drain discussing making it into a movie with Disney!
Damn I want to swap to another paralel universe sometimes. One where Adams did EVERYTHING we think he'd have been good at, and where Britney Spears lives next door and cooks me pastries for breakfast on sundays!