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Paraphrasing Sentences With Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the university-paraphrase-progress dept.

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."

3 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The problem is... by ravydavygravy · · Score: 5, Informative

    a computer has to be given programming for every idiom there is.

    Rubbish - Ever heard of Machine Learning?

    There has been much work on resolving coreferance and named-entity recognition problems has been onging for several years, with the aim being to lead onto full NLP. This research seems interesting in that it takes work from another field (genetic sequence matching) and applies it to an NLP problem. What links them all is that in almost every case, the research involves machine learning at some point... it makes no sense to hand-code millions of case-specific rules, when a machine can learn them faster and better...

    Read their paper and you'll see that indeed it's an unsupervised learning approach - even nicer in that it doesn't require you to label training examples for the algorithm...

    ~D

  2. Re:google? by millette · · Score: 5, Informative
    Just discovered this:
    Now when searching Google, you can use a ~ (tilde) to find pages using synonyms of the word you're searching for. For instance, search for:


    css ~help

    and you'll get sites with tutorials, guides, support, etc.
  3. Re:This reminds me of the Infocom classics by blancolioni · · Score: 5, Informative

    Interactive fiction hasn't died, and you can certainly play it on your PDA. Furthermore, it's generally acknowledged that the quality of modern works has surpassed that of Infocom. Baf's guide is probably a good place to dip your toes in, but there's resources all over the place and the annual competition has just finished.

    An interactive novel, at least the kind you're probably thinking about with deeply implemented characters and so forth, is probably AI-complete. It's not about the disk space and processor speed, it's about the inherent trickiness.