Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

8 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. This reminds me of the Infocom classics by chewtoy-11 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    There is a mailbox here.

    --
    C. Griffin
    "Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
  2. google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    so would this allow something like google to pick up a phrase and relate it to the results instead of just picking up keywords?

  3. how it can be useful by Dreadlord · · Score: 4, Interesting

    one of the ways I can think of to use this technology is to improve search engine capabilities, instead of looking for exactly the same words, search engines then can look for similar sentences, giving more accurate results.
    However, after reading the article, I wonder whether the research can be applied to Latin languages, as they did the research on semantic languages.

    --
    The IT section color scheme sucks.
  4. Hrm by Auckerman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was too lazy to lazy to read the article so I used the Summarize feature in OS X to parse the sentences down since it seems a bit wordy.

    Okay, maybe I exaggerate a bit here, I did read the article and while the summarize isn't that far off from what these guys are doing...

    --

    Burn Hollywood Burn
  5. Google News? by cryptor3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm curious as to whether Google News, since it draws from various news sources and groups articles by topic (similar to paraphrasing, perhaps), uses any of the same techniques.

  6. Re:Fascinating read by Trejkaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I guess you could try using Esperanto or Lojban as your intermediary language. Lojgan in particular is computer parseable *and* human understandable, so it would probably be the easiest to write translations for.

    --
    Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
  7. Spamfilter by Goodbyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Shouldn't this make it possible to improve spam filters?

  8. How I do this in my product by MarkWatson · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I use a fairly effective algorithm to do this in my product:

    I first classify the text into a category, then weight every word in the text based on how much it contributed to this classification - I then output as a "summary" of the one or two sentences in the original text that most contribute to the classification of the entire text.

    Not really sumarization, but useful.

    -Mark