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Browsing the Web, One Sentence at a Time
rtmyers writes "A really simple yet radical idea: break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences and do useful sentence-level things. This is the paradigm shift behind the product called Infowalker, which unfortunately is implemented as an IE toolbar, but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera.
Currently implemented features include sentence-level interfaces for TTS, translation, large-type display, and the funkiest of all, dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords extracted from each sentence -- hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows today! Then there's the feature to show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading -- which presumably is the revenue model behind the product, but turns out to also be surprisingly useful.
This might not be for everyone, but it could just be the first real change in the browsing model since the earliest browsers starting throwing text up on the screen more than a decade ago. And apparently, Infowalker's architecture allows for pluggable third-party sentence-level "behaviors", with the potential for the development of a whole ecosystem of sentence-level functionality in browsers. And it seems Infowalker can also be controlled by strategically placed custom CSS tags within the HTML, raising the possibility of a new class of web pages especially tuned for this sentence-based approach."
If you really want to browse the web, try this: The world's best Surf Engine IconSurf.com, where you surf the web using website icons. When you want to explore instead of doing targeted searches or visiting the same old sites, this is the way to do it. Shameless plug of my new toy, but it's pretty revolutionary as well. I'd appreciate any feedback, as the site is just a little over 1 week old.
...if people writing Web pages actually used sentences.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Come on. Who reads that way. We read by browsing, skimming, skipping. We do our own keyword search in our heads and skip the all-to-common fluff and bad writing that's crammed into Web pages.
For a 6 year-old, this might work. But they are missing some key points on how Web pages are consumed in the real world.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Because as this shows, breaking coherent paragraphs up into sentences and further mashing them into keywords, makes works far more accesible.
Good precis is a skill, and a creative and demanding one at that. A computer will no more likely do a good summary of a lengthy text, than it could write a novel.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I do not support the idea of ad-fetching based on a per-sentence reasoning, because it means more ads and interruptions (browser interstitials, really). It's totally inefficient for end users and it only gives the advertisers a hard-on because they get to really psychologically assault surfers (which is a huge turn on to advertisers because they feel like they are super-human if they can fuck with our heads... it's fucking sick if you ask me). I prefer Slashdot's method of bonus features that subscribers can get by chipping in. Why can't advertisers come up with better concepts for selling their product (perhaps by word of mouth because it's a good product, not because we're always tripping over an ad about it).
In my books, the more ads I see about a product, the less I want the product, because the product must be sold at an inflated cost to pay for advertising, or it must be a poor product if they are pushing it so hard. Word of mouth is best.
Agghk! Black-flagged on the opening lap!
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
yeah, I can think of a few sentences involving Jenna Jameson and/or Taylor Rain that'll give infowalker some real interesting 'third party behaviors' :-)
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Is it just me or do 90% of the icons not even load up. I am on cable internet right now and a huge majority of the boxes have the little red x in the corner.
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
...that means I am admitting to having IE on my machine...
Is it just me, or did all that make no sense what -so-ever?
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
This is the paradigm shift
This is the what?!? Are marketing and management people posting to Slashdot now?
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
I have no idea what you mean. If someone takes the time to put the information online, we shoudl take the time to read it.
OK, I only ready the first couple of lines of this article, but I am sure that is where all of the relevant info was.
I'd type more, but my 7 seconds of attention have just expir
I could have sworn we retired "paradigm shift" when the .com bubble burst. I could be wrong.
I hate sigs.
In 1994 I was sentenced to multiple concurrent life sentences, at hard labor: browsing the Web, writing the Web, and waiting for the Web.
--
make install -not war
out of a non-semantic web. As units of language, sentences are still context sensitive, so this will very quickly get mired in throwing up offensive and inapropriate results. Imagine an article 'Man driven to suicide by music of Justin Timberlake' followd by 'Buy Justin Timberlake CDs on Amazon'.
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Imagine all the way spammers could use this. Change it to sentences. They would have a field day with this.
Evolution or ID?
1)dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords
2)show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading
I am always nervous of any IE plugin (especially search bars) that do not come with a privacy policy.
Seeing as it is most certain that some information must be sent from your computer in order to perform the above tasks, I would think some sort of privacy policy is in order.
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
Ah yes, that beautiful word "paradigm shift." I forget the exact wording, but the general quote goes something along the lines of "any time you hear that phrase, smile and nod while slowly backing away."
That's a good idea. I'm going to make an addon for IE that does spell checking and auto-fixing. Now if we can just get the spelling and grammar trolls to use it so we don't have to listen to them grumble.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Sweet Zombie Jesus, I did not spend my time turning off animated gifs, turning off Flash, stopping those stupid "download this plugin" buttons from popping up, using Google instead of Antarti.ca's let's-fly-over-the-web-in-a-low-flying-fighter-jet search engine, and running search-and-destroy missions on the remaining dancing baloney just to turn every web page into a goddamned sentence-by-sentence Powerpoint(tm) presentation!
In the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who the hell comes up with this crap?
Carousel is a lie!
I may never have to actually read ever again! :-)
--- Ban humanity.
Did Jon Katz submit this article?
Most natural language processing is done at the sentence level, so this is quite common. And plenty of work has been done on information retrieval using sentence and paragraph context.
It's less common to expose this to users, but it isn't clear that the sentence level is what should be exposed anyway. Better semantic markup of web pages into related sections or topics might be useful. But given that we can't even get authors to generate correct HTML the way it is, it's doubtful much would come of such a proposal.
"a whole ecosystem of sentence-level functionality"
yada yada yada...
Does anyone have an english translation for this article?
I'm sorry, but I don't download somthing that I can't see. I mean, at least some screen shots or a demo of how it will work. How can you trust this?
Ever see dashboard? It takes information gathered during IRC, IM, web browsing, e-mail, and more, does a lot of backend cluepacket mojo, and returns a lot of useful information while you work. If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link. Microsoft is working on the same thing, called "implicit query" or some such. Look at the Windows Longhorn screenshots so far... It looks like they are taking the classic IE information sidebar and altering it to work in this way.
Why do I get the feeling that this turns rich web pages into bit-size powerpoint bullets? (Confession, I have no windows machines so have no way of testing this thing). Maybe they will create a version that converts webpages into Flash animations -- showing ... you ... one ... word ... at ... a .... time.
On the other hand, this type of content decompostion technology highlights the superiority of markup langages (e.g., HTML) over page layout languages (e.g. PDF). HTML retains more of the meaning of the content while PDF is basically a fancy way of converting content into a screenshot. Try extracting sentences from a PDF, what a PITA.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sounds like using braille terminal...
I dont know about you but breaking a webpage into sentances could get quite annoying.
/. that would be too frequent scrolling.
/. as the start of a new sentance?? That might create some problems here.
It would also take twice the space to read anything.
Considering the size of most articles submitted here at
It also seems that it would break up ideas as well as sentences since most ideas overflow into more than one sentance.
would it interperate the period in
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Interesting idea. And if you can read the intent behind each sentence then you can build on this to provide personalized or customized content to the reader based on text read off the page and compared to the user profile. I've been thinking about a tangent to this for a long time now, but can never figure out how to actually build it.
It's the idea of each thought being an atom of the content tree, captured in either a sentence, sentence group or paragraph. If each thought is a unique object, then each can be dynamically associated with relevant metadata or hyperlinks, and also manipulated to provide the user with the level of detail or level of expertise that's appropriate for them.
The example I use is a textbook on a common subject...say, microeconomics. The "thought" of price competition could either be encapsulated in a simple way for a survey-level audience or dynamically substituted to a more complex version that provides better information to better education audiences (e.g., "price competition varies by industry structure, where the degree of product homogeneity largely determines the pressures placed on pricing" for mid-level audiences and "price competition is the ability for each firm to impact the price that other firms in the marketplace can charge" for an entry-level audience). In this case, the system would need to understand both how to understand the content object and then how to articulate it back to the user in understandable terms.
We're getting there...but I don't think there's enough base technology to launch this idea yet. There's a lot of AI involved, particularly when it comes to the varied characterstics of the audience (people don't tend to come according to standards...). Maybe I'll do something fabulous with this in 10-20 years or so...
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
Can we get a screenshot?
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
This is the paradigm shift...
This is where I lost interest.
From the site: "Works seamlessly with Internet Explorer--keep browsing just as you do now"
Uh, I use Mozilla Firefox because it embraces the current standards, especially CSS.
"custom CSS tags within the HTML"
I hope this means a custom external stylesheet, not invalid markup within the page; their site isn't exactly using the current standards or embracing CSS either.And, most importantly, at least try to go through the system (W3C) before resorting to custom markup such as this. How does this relate to the Semantic Web? Have they gone through the process of presenting this as a new standard or improving upon a standard? I doubt it.
Seriously, can someone turn off the corpspeak, and actually state what this thing does? It sounds more like a total product plug than an actual review of anything useful. The best I can tell is that it just links each sentence of a page to a product--big whoop.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Good luck with writing a spelling and grammar fixer which English-speaking people from both sides of the Atlantic are happy to use.
So it can highlight sentences of a webpage at a time and display them as large type. I must admit I am rather underwhelmed by this paradigm shift.
If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link.
What a pain that would be. If I want information, **I** will decide I need information. I do not need some background process to decide for me.
In your specific example, suppose I was chasing down a intermittant bug. After the 40th time seeing "Bug 1565 is....", I would gladly junk the whole system.
This seems too much like Clippy: "I see you have bug 1565 again. Would you like to see the explanation and how to de-bug it?"
Yuck!
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
"This is the paradigm shift behind the product called Infowalker, which unfortunately is implemented as an IE toolbar, but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera."
Yeah, how could they choose the most popular browser when there are non-MS broswers out there. After all, it shouldn't be about business or technology, but political correctness.
Come on. This is *Stupid. This is goofy-stupid. This is dumber than "push technology" was.
Have you *noticed the signal to noise ratio we're dealing with here?
This is the most tedious and worthless 'enhancement' I've heard of in at least a year.
Unless they somehow developed a scheme for automatically detecting useful content in a webpage, I'm going to keep visually skimming them with my own two eyes until i find the one tidbit of useful data mixed in with all the dross.
I can just see this tool. "Ok, no, that sentence didn't help. Nope, not that one eather . . . no . . . no . . . . no . . . . god this is boring . . "
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
there are a large number of people who would use the sentence tag so that they could finally get two spaces after the end of a sentence and still have clean (x)html and css. right now, the cleanest way to accomplish this is {sentence 1}{non-breaking space}{breaking space}{sentence 2}. This does not provide any seperation of style from content.
Why on earth do people persist in calling everything that has any tenuous connection to the web a "tag"?
For fucks sake. There is no such thing as a "CSS tag". There are also no such things as "alt tags", "HTTP tags", and so on. Even when people talk about HTML tags, what they really mean are elements, element types, attributes or attribute values.
The web does not revolve around tags!
Here is an interesting little tool for converting from sentences to images...Symbolify..it uses Google's image search.
What they've come up with is an ingenious method of directing advertisements, but they've completely failed to provide any reason for consumers to use it. Hey, I've got an even better idea! Let's give away a set-top box that hooks up to your cable/satellite receiver and overlays small ads while you watch TV! Advertisers will love it because they can target ads based on what people are watching. Now all we have to do it get people to hook this box up to their TV. Perhaps if we have it overlay the time and temperature as well, people will want it for its utility....yeah...that's it...
* "whole language" is where you don't teach kids to read at the phonetic/letter level, but instead just let them learn whole words "naturally" by following along in their own book while the teacher reads aloud. If this seems ridiculous and nonsensical, that's because it is. It was dreamed up by a fool who "observed" that when one reads, one doesn't sound out individual letters, and then assemble the letters into words; no, one just reads words. The logical flaw here is the assumption that there is no letter-level parsing when, in fact, there is-- it's just not noticable as a distinct step because we do it so efficiently.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Good point. Their website has no pictures showing what this product looks like and how it works. For that matter, there isn't a lot of information about the company itself.
I'll wait to see some reviews before I investigate further...
-MT.
-MT.
My buzzword alarm went off on "paradigm shift" too. Next thing you know, this will be the "de facto standard."
... but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera.
No. Mozilla does not need any more features built in. What it would be useful as is a plugin for those who want it.
Their web site says, "Display the best on-line shopping sites for items mentioned in each sentence."
Swell. So it's adware. Cleverly disguised as.. uh.. adware?
Sure, it's based on a novel idea... but i'm betting this idea was spawned in a thinktank where the single goal was to find a new form of targetted advertising, and the biggest challenge they faced was giving users a reason to download it. of all the "cool things" it says it can do, the only item that seems worth pursuit is the inline language translation...
I never cease to be amazed at users' appreciation for relatively useless software. *cough*GATOR*cough*
In Soviet Redmond, software programs you!
The information is supposed to be viewed at a glance, off to the side, and potentially useful. It's not popping up on top of your work saying "This bug is blah blah blah".
One of the things I would love to see it do, for instance, is if it brought up contact information about a specifc person, I would love to see which time zone they live in and their local time.
So far as I'm concerned, this just feeds into the "sound-bite" culture vortex that television has been sucking us into for the last 2 decades. Why do we feel the need to strip the nuance and subtlety from everything?
This study seems to confirm what I've always thought about our soul-less Info-culture. I love technology, but we need to be careful that it doesn't strip away our humanity.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
"Our mission is to the enhance the world's web browsing experience. To do this, we bring the latest innovations from psycho-ergonomics, neuro-economics, and compu-architectonics together in the form of completely free products which are ridiculously easy to use and amazingly useful."
Ummmmm...psycho-ergonomics?
neuro-economics?
compu-architectonics?
Are these made up terms?
Or I am I just that out of touch.
OK, so why stop at sentences? Let's do word, no character, no pixel, no ELECTRON at a time browsing!
-Shane
I love teh int4rw3b!!!!!111one1
...how much they paid for this front-page ad?
Yet more proof that the internet we've come to know and love will be horribly massacred and have its soul sucked out by marketing types and management looking to use it for their own disgusting means. Just like what happened in the early 90s.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
A sentence is basically a linear construct. But the way our brain processes a sentence is non-linear. We skip forward, we refer back. We process the sentence in this "looping" fashion until we comprehend it (or not, sometimes we just read it in linear fashion and move on to the next sentence in hopes that it will provide more context for us).
Read any good sonnets lately?
google. bomb.
the future's bright, the future's ginger
I did a little digging into our poster "rtmyers."
A google search on his email gave me this page, which reveals to us his name.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2001-MaThen I looked up who registered NaturallyOpen.com at Register.com.
WHOIS lookup on Register.comSurprise, Surprise... the same guy.
He could have told us in the post that he wrote the thing.
Stop posting product announcements on Slashdot! Argh.
that's where all the 'related to content? links' lead the hostages right back to the felonious kingdumb of softwar gangsters/virot growers.
the 'new' feechurn eye gas, is having robbIE's blessing?
lookout bullow.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... you'll find the (b)right links.
Oh... you mean americans aren't the only ones in the world that speak english? I guess that's the price we pay for using slashdot as our only means of contact to the world around us. ;-)
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
it didn't grab me as being that useful, i couldn't get the product thing to work or the URL preview. what did work was slow and not very user friendly.
Having read the comments so far, I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiasm. But as a professor, I can see two valuable uses for sentence browsing (tho I'm not clear as to whether this is really a search engine or a targeted marketing device).
1. identify plagiarized materials in students' term papers. I do pretty well just googling the topic, but I'm sure I'd catch more students cheating if I could type in suspicious sentences.
2. I'm on a medieval listserv, and people often write in with queries like, 'can you find where St. Augustine said this?' Especially if the add-on can be restricted to a list of sites to search, this would really be a boon for scholars doing close textual work.
Sounds to me like a good opportunity to continually generate targeted ads. So maybe it will be more like Clippy popping up and saying "I see you have bug 1565 again. Why not try the latest Visual Studio .NET debugging tools?" or maybe "I see you have a bug problem, why not try Doom bugspray?".
>>"Innovative... hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows today!"
Yeah, except Opera 7.x already does that.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
"A really simple yet radical idea: break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences and do useful sentence-level things.
Currently implemented features include sentence-level interfaces for TTS, translation, large-type display, and the funkiest of all, dynamic display of an image pulled off the web based on keywords extracted from each sentence -- hey, turn all your web pages into slide shows today! "
Cheers,
Ian
I'm using AC here because I can't remember my login name (probably pre-alzheimers or something).
/. already does, but with some enhancements. The slides are available here
There's a different approach that I spoke about at StoryCon 2002, that I call "augmented storytelling", which, in some sense, is similar to what
I don't know what these guys are doing, the blurb on their site is funny but I don't want an IE plugin. However, it is possible they are a couple computational linguistics grads..
I did a survey of literature, coming at it from a layman developer's angle, and it seems the one area of natural language recognition (hence their name naturally open?) where computers are trustworthy and even exceed humans, is pronoun extraction. Not semantic recognition where meaning is understood, but just getting the who/where/what of proper nouns and being able to also link pronouns to them correctly. It's somewhere around 95% accurate and apparently better than a human volunteer in average accuracy, in one test.
This is accomplished not by dividing into sentences but looking at passages of multiple sentences. Perhaps theirs does some of this too, but even a very simple product searcher could just look for words not in its dictionary and google them. So it is not obvious what the merits of their approach are. Personally I'm interested in text-based interaction and news retrieval with open NLP tools.
Is there any engine/technique that can allow wild card searches? or even regular expression in search words?
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
I'd love to be able to process displayed web page text through an E-lisp variant prior to the page being displayed in Mozilla. I've found a project for something like that on Sourceforge but it doesn't look like it's gone anywhere.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is a paradigm shift. They don't need screenshots.
This study is no shock to me, though I do wonder how much of the TV they showed the test subjects was "good" stuff like Sesame Street (I miss the Electric Company) and how much was "bad" stuff like commercial-laden Saturday morning cartoons. And I have to say, gay or not, The Teletubbies moved at a MUCH slower pace than most kids' shows, even when I WAS sober. Good stuff, I think. "La-la, BALL!" ;-)
Don't get me started on the writing on the web. (Whatever happened to Grammar Nazi?) My degree isn't in Computers, it's in English. I STAY disgusted when I surf.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
...the business bastards don't try and use it to provide us with "new and innovative marketing experiences, I'm OK with this. We need a new right in this modern age, the right to NOT be marketed to at all. It used to be an unspoken right, but with new technologies like this one, it needs to be written down somewhere. I'd like to just be able to jump on the internet and not see one ad, get any spam, register just to read an article or participate in any surveys. Is that so wrong (said in that classic Harvey Fierstein voice)? As modern citizens we have the right to a commercial free life. But that right has been erroded and many people these days don't even realize it is a right. Instead they are being blinded into thinking that businesses have a right to our money. It's a privledge for them to get money from us and they'd better bend over backwards to get even a smidgen. At least that's the way things SHOULD be.
Un-news
What's really funny is that I read his post thinking "It sounds like he's selling this to us, not just telling us about it. I bet it's his." So I looked at the comments, knowing that if that were true, someone would have checked up on it.
break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences
Not sure if this is the same thing, but Opera browser lets you highlight links, headings, and each individual tag -- such as paragraph, list-item, etc. -- using the A-Q, S-W, and D-E keys to move Down and up respectively. The highlighted text can be copied using Ctrl+C or used with the context menu to do a search, translation, or whatever else they've added to the context menu.
but would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera
Well, I think this would be a great feature for one of these PDAs that have 802.11b -- the small screens could use creative, alternative ways to browse the web.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Let's imagine browsing slashdot a sentence at a time.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Now, I can see the w and the s tags.
hahhahahhahahhahahahah.
uhm, they actually have this on their website. This has to be an april fools joke, it's just a little late.
This is stupid. To see real ideas, go to an Idea Board
First we had speeches. Then excerpts. Then sound bytes. Now sound nibbles? How soon to sound bits?
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
You almost don't *need* spyware with that kind of granularity, but my first reaction to "IE Toolbars" is always to ask "what spyware things does it do?" Some of them are really ugly stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Something like this could be useful for research when viewing text heavy pages. It could help one read faster, because one limitation of reading speed is how fast the eye can move. Your eye could stay stationary. Another limitation is our tendency to read the speed of audibility, so the read aloud feature is useless to me. But great for the visually impaired. You're supposed to be able to make the plugin walk through the page but it doesn't seem to work. I think it's already broken once or twice because IE crashed once and later pressing alt and clicking just cycled through webpages as if I was pressing back and forward. Had to restart browser. The walk feature with the ability to change the walk speed would be great. If you had the ability to read ps and pdf files, you'd have a A-1 research tool.
Considering the tone of impartiality Bobby tried to use, you'd think he would have at least tried to fake the username the story was posted under. Spot the feeble balancing patterns: say something slightly negative and follow it up with a sales point.
Maybe the submitter could learn to use paragraphs. His story submission is damn long.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
It may not be a paradigm shift, but maybe it will help you read faster...the work on Rapid Serial Visual Presentation is pretty persuasive, and has recently shown promise for Palms.
In other words, if I put a recipe for chicken breasts on the Internet, this software will detect the word 'breasts' and display some pr0n next to it, whereupon the justice department will beset your door and drag you kicking and screaming to the slammer. Now go and TRY to prove that it was the computer's fault.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh well.