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Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence
eldavojohn writes "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner: '"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word B12. If the program never saw B12 before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.'"
You don't think there are hundreds of thousands of zombifiable computers in the United States? And what about people with business connections in China or Korea?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Since when a database + automated search (keyword patterns and relations) = artifical intelligence?
However many academic papers and spam filters throw their ever-more-elaborate algorithms at this issue, it is an arms race that cannot be won by the "good guys", as long as lawmakers keep pretending that technology alone could prevent the effects of sociopathic behavior: unsolicited bulk messages won't go away unless sending them is severely punishable and vigorously prosecuted in all nations that contribute to the problem. This should have happened more than a decade ago, but now the world is simply running out of storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles much too quickly to afford waiting another decade (or even a year) for serious, intransigent anti-spam legislation that is long overdue.
There are lots of legit e-mails discussing vitamins, viagara or even penis enlargement, this post included.
Infer too much and the false positive rate skyrockets, though...