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.

Comments

The Ultimate Tool For Plagiarism

[popo]

All someone has to do now is marry this technology with a term-paper database, and "Hello Original Work!"

The question will then become, how many different unique "paraphrases" can the system ultimately generate?

Someone must research a story . . .

[kfg]

conduct interviews and generate original copy. These people are called reporters.

The people who take this copy off the wire and paraphrase it for publication in the local paper are called copy writers.

This software will reduce the number of copy writers needed, not reporters.

This is certainly an issue to the copy writers and their families, but overall it's really just a blue collar worker being replaced by a robot issue.

The idea of a 'style dial' I find a bit more disturbing.

KFG

The article, summarized by MacOS X

[sakusha]

MacOS X has a summarization feature implemented in the Services menu. I decided to summarize the CNet article just to see what I got, and because I like the idea of summarizing an article about summarizing.

In the famous sketch from the TV show "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the actor John Cleese had many ways of saying a parrot was dead, among them, "This parrot is no more," "He's expired and gone to meet his maker," and "His metabolic processes are now history."
...The program gathers text from online news services on specific subjects, learns the characteristic patterns of sentences in these groupings and then uses those patterns to create new sentences that give equivalent information in different words.
The researchers, Regina Barzilay, an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lillian Lee, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, said that while the program would not yield paraphrases as zany as those in the Monty Python sketch, it is fairly adept at rewording the flat cadences of news service prose.

Bring on the Machines

[DumbSwede]

I don't think many people read the article. While Michael suggest this could replace reporters, it is not about summarizing a whole article, but merely paraphrasing individual sentences and elements. This would be useful for checking for plagiarism where one author has merely line by line paraphrased another. Another useful area is in language translation, where the paraphrasing may make the translation more understandable. I don't think todays translation programs allow you to say the the same thing two or three times, but repeat it back differently (paraphrase) if not understood by your listener the first time.

Of course the time will come when machines summarize articles, and I believe I have seen where this has already been tried with mixed success. It would be kind of neat to see /. use both a summary engine and a paraphrase engine on submitted articles. Then we could have 3 article descriptions: the posters description; a machine summary of the same article; and a machine paraphrase of the original posters summary.