Slashdot Mirror
Computers Paraphrase English
AhaIndia submits a link to a story discussing computerized paraphrasing of English news articles. This technology, destined to eventually replace most reporters with very small shell scripts, is thankfully still in its infancy.
I've provided search engine functionality to a few sites using Verity's K2 product, which provides a similar piece of functionality. If you (programmatically) ask it to return a summary of each hit, what you get is what it considers to be representative of the document as a whole, not merely the first few lines, or a paragraph, or whatever. It actually works pretty well, but then it should, as (a couple of years ago) it cost almost as much as my house...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Unfortunately, there isn't yet a way to use computers to detect dupes.
Or Is there?!?
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Lojban is among the more interesting newer languages. It can be parsed just like c! Esperanto is somewhat interesting. English will be regarded in the future as a curious artifact--it was swept along with the technology revolution simply because ASCII didn't include accents and extra marks on letters. Eventually we'll get away from vocalization all together and have purely numerical, written laguages.
Right now, trying to work with English in computers deals way more with the strangeness of the language than the more interesting issues of cognition that lie underneath.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
This article posted before already tells us all this, the paper that originated it was mentioned in the comments, and this one is another of a series of papers by this researcher.
OK, nothing else to see here, move on to the next redundant post (Is that paraphrasing 'dupe'?)