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

This reminds me of the Infocom classics

[chewtoy-11]

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.

Re:This reminds me of the Infocom classics

[blancolioni]

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.

Someone help me out here

[prockcore]

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

Re:The problem is...

[ravydavygravy]

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

Re:Fascinating read

[Jugalator]

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?

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) ... to this:

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.

Re:google?

[millette]

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.