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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."
That's there's absolutely nothing formulaic about idioms, which comprise 80% or so of english conversation. A human learns it by years of experience, a computer has to be given programming for every idiom there is.
Things like this are what makes academic research Really Cool and allows useful things to come about, Go Cornell.
... and I'd relate my 2nd and 3rd paragraph if it wasn't 3am here. Goodnight, slashdot. :)
I'd note that this is a novel approach, and, for better or for worse, it goes about doing things much differently than our minds do.
Actually, though, it's closer to how humans understand writing (stringing together atomic words/phrases in an implicit context) than previous statistical methods.
RD
I wonder what its' application could be, other than to detect duplicates... Perhaps, a tool to suggest ways of rewriting sentences? Or maybe part of a more advanced grammar check?
... to this:
My first thought was translation tools. GOOD translation tools that understand the grammar in the source language, and uses the grammar in the destination language to form the resulting sentence.
There has been some work on something to solve this problem, where a phrase in language A was translated to some special "universal" code, and then finally to language B. The developers would then need to make the translator translate all languages to the universal code, and vice versa. The universal code could be whatever necessary to make the software as easily as possible be able to preserve the "meaning" of the sentence.
However, if this is done, the problem could change from this:
Source: I love hot dogs.
Destination: Ich liebe heiBe Hunde. (i.e. a literal translation, from Altavista Babelfish)
Source: I love hot dogs.
Destination: Ich liebe Nahrung. ("I love food")
In case the universal language wasn't advanced enough and the english -> universal translator conversion was "lossy". So we might exchange our current problem with mangled grammar with lots information.
Here's a web site about it, and I'm sure there are many more.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I always loved the text adventure games by Infocom. They were way ahead of their time, and I have been truly amazed on several occasions by the software's ability to 'understand' what I was asking it to do. Of course I'm sure this is leaps and bounds beyond what was available back then, but it's truly amazing how far ahead of their time they actually were.
Yes. I can't be the only one that is disappointed that text adventure development essentially died. The great limiting factors always used to be memory (with no disc drives, the whole game had to be stored in a very limited amount of memory) and processing speed. Now that we have both of these in abundance it should be possible to write a real "interactive novel", but I guess that will never happen. Shame, it's a great format for cell phones and pdas.
Um, infocom's text interface wasn't too complex. I mean, it mostly simple commands in the form "verb + noun."
> open mailbox
Not to mention the increased ability to quickly spot "re-written" bought term papers.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Or how about removing redundant comments?