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Mining Neologisms from Wikipedia

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everchanging-face-of-net-slang dept.

holy_calamity writes "Natual Language Programming researchers have developed a tool called Zeitgeist that can discover the meaning of new words for itself using Wikipedia. It looks for entries for words not in the WordNet database and works out their meaning by looking for known words linked to them. Development of the tool is focusing on using it to understand what bloggers (using slang and neologisms) are saying about companies' products."

1 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Hello? by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Development of the tool is focusing on using it to understand what bloggers (using slang and neologisms) are saying about companies' products."

    You do not need a fancy program to do this. I can do it for you, without even reading the blogs in question.

    Watch.

    They are saying your products suck, and that your customer support is worthless.

    See how easy that was? Now, you might be wondering how I know this. Simple. They don't use made up words to say good things about you. I'm not sure why (maybe they aren't worried about being sued for saying good things?), but the pattern is very consistent. If somebody goes to the trouble of writing about you in their blog using made up words, they don't like you or the horse you rode in on.

    Likewise, if you are a journalist, they call you funny names (Steno Sue, Laura Dildo, Kneepads Miller, "Dollar a Word" Armstrong, etc.) because they've noticed that you consistently write to favour a certain party, position, politician, company, or lifestyle, even when this requires ignoring a pile of facts the size of Paraguay, any one of which would shred your position.

    And if you're a politician, it means that someone noticed that what you say in speeches is so unconnected to what you do with the office you hold that the only link between them is the way in which they combine to mollify your nominal constituents while maximizing the benefit to your corporate sponsors.

    If you are an industry association, they are saying they hate you, period, and that you are evil incarnate.

    See how easy this is? If you still don't get it, I am willing to come out of retirement as a consultant to explain it to you, provided the price is right.

    --MarkusQ