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.'"

Comments

uh oh, there goes wikipedia

[ILuvRamen]

don't you think masses of spammers are going to screw with wikipedia strategically on purpose so that it doesn't work properly for that if it starts to work very well to block them? They should just stop being afraid of being called racist and super-filter every e-mail that comes out of South Korea, Indonesia, and especially Nigeria, etc. Type spam map into google image search to see how blatently obvious it is to see where the spam comes from. Something like 98% of spam can be pinned down to 0.01% of the world by square footage. If they added fuzzy logic instead of alterable AI and only block e-mails from south korea with the word vitamin and not block ones from Nebraska with the word vitamin, then the problem would be decreased dramatically.

Re:uh oh, there goes wikipedia

[WilliamSChips]

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?

Re:uh oh, there goes wikipedia

[ScentCone]

You don't think there are hundreds of thousands of zombifiable computers in the United States?

Um, so? That doesn't make it inappropriate to block traffic from places where the overwhelming majority of the packets are toxic. It's a system-by-system, admin-by-admin judgement call, but there's no question that Korea isn't doing nearly enough to stop this problem locally. If the local culture starts to realize that they're isolating themselves from large sections of the internet because they won't do something to prevent 99% of their outbound mail from being spam, then maybe the need to filter will also go away.

And what about people with business connections in China or Korea?

I have a lot of customers with contacts like that. All of them (their Asian contacts) use Yahoo, Gmail, and similar accounts specifically to avoid this problem. Businesses in China and Korea are totally aware that most ISPs in those areas have poisoned outbound SMTP relays and user desktops. Or, they host their western-facing mail servers with providers in the west - I see a lot of that, too, since many of those businesses have two separate messaging platforms for the different international audiences with whom they communicate.

Re:uh oh, there goes wikipedia

[Mr Chund Man]

Spam Map

"South Korea, Indonesia, and especially Nigeria, etc"
While we're at it, why not block Alberta, California, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Spain, France and Portugal - all spam hotspots according to the map cited? What's that, you receive email from people in these places? Tough titties, if we're to block email coming from spam hotspots as you say.

Also, you've managed to point a finger of blame at Indonesia and Nigeria who are saintly in comparison to some more developed nations. Go racism!

Nothing new here...

[Bodrius]

This isn't new to Slashdotters...

For years, Slashdot posts have used wikipedia as a form of artificial intelligence.

i prefer

[macadamia_harold]

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.

I think it would be much more effective if we used a taxidermy-based solution to fight spammers.

Re:Save me! Math.

[CRCulver]

The Bayesian analysis in spam filters only works on text. Spammers realized that they could get around it by filling the text portion of the message with some random passage from a Project Gutenberg file, thus making it seem innocuous, and then putting the real advertisement in a GIF or PNG file that would be displayed by HTML-capable mail readers. Bayesian analysis can still work, but only in combination with OCR software.

Artificial intelligence!

[tcopeland]

And all this time you thought it was just if and switch statements!

Whenever someone claims that a program is semantically aware, be sure to reread Clay Shirky's article on the Semantic web.

UMMMM wordnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

this kind of technique has been used for a while..

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

and according to my source of AI, wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet
(like all sophisticated software) has been in development since the mid eighties..

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing

Since when

[trifish]

Since when a database + automated search (keyword patterns and relations) = artifical intelligence?

Re:Since when

[timeOday]

Since when a database + automated search (keyword patterns and relations) = artifical intelligence?

What part of human/animal intelligence is not detecting, storing, and applying patterns and relations?

Just make spam a crime!

[D4C5CE]

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.

Re:WikiTuring Test

[Halo1]

I recently got quite funny attempt like that, pumping some stock in the image attachment (which moreover looked like a captcha in order to avoid ocr). The title of the spam was however "cocaine inexcusable", and the body, well (just two sample quotes -- and yes, the two first sentences appeared together like that):

We are working with Internet Content Rating Association to make the internet safer for children. Powered by a super strong Japanese motor and gears this incredibly powerful anal probe will hit the spot every time.
The Blue Rocket is a handy little clit massager that packs a mighty punch.

Needless to say, it triggered the bayasian filter pretty heavily in spite of all the obfuscation attempts :)

Re:The B12 example is horrible

[tepples]

Suppose somebody was trying to sell me a B12 bomber.

Then your e-mail account's Bayes map would have the map (word B12 -> folder Aircraft) with a high probability, which would outweigh (word B12 -> article Vitamin -> folder Drug Spam).

Not very "intelligent"

[iamacat]

There are lots of legit e-mails discussing vitamins, viagara or even penis enlargement, this post included.

Not New, not newsworthy

[Sub Zero 992]

Anybody who has been working in the field of NLP (natural language processing) can do little more than snear at this story.

The field of word sense exploration is one of the more mature areas of NLP, take a look at Princeton's WordNet database for an example [http://wordnet.princeton.edu/]. Using their word sense database (without referring to silly words such as "ontology") it has been possible - for years - to discover if two lemmas (thats "words" to you) are related in a particular way, or not related. Using wordnet it is possible to distinguish between antonyms and homonyms, thereby thwarting spammers who use words which sound like "viagra" - "niagra" and words which have opposite meanings.

Re:Wikipedia needs work for spam filtering....

[Metasquares]

Infer too much and the false positive rate skyrockets, though...