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."

Comments

First use of this technology

[mcrbids]

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!

Someone help me out here

[prockcore]

I'm too lazy to read the article.. could someone write some software to paraphrase it for me?

Goodbye, Cliff Notes...

[IvyMike]

Hello, automatic paraphrasing of literature.

P.S. Just joking, kids. Stay in school!

Another Killer App

[varjag]

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.

Finally ...

[makapuf]

a "-1, redundant" generator.

Interesting

[Illserve]

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!

SCO Analysis

[richie2000]

I tried running this on all statements and press releases coming out of SCO and Darl McBride for the last six months and after a thorough semantic analysis, this is the resulting summary:

"Pass me the crackpipe, man!"

Proudly karma-whoring since the turn of the millenium

Yes.

[Gordonjcp]

An American friend of mine was terribly confused by the expression "Crash us a fag, mate".