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Facebook Now Using Natural Language Processing

Posted by timothy on from the skynet-enters-rem-sleep dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a Posted About story, even if your friends don't explicitly tag the Page. It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well."

8 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Back to Usenet? by zmughal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, now that we can correlate what people are talking about to topics, can we get proper threading? The code doesn't work in some overloaded cases such as categorizing the phrase "Big Apple" under "Apple, Inc.".

  2. Natural language? by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now if Facebook could only get posters to actually post in some sort of readable "natural language."

  3. image replies by Lehk228 · · Score: 2

    can Zuckerberg pull his hands out of his ass for a few minutes and allow image replies to posts? every bbcode html and *chan board has been able to do so since forever

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
    1. Re:image replies by Trogre · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait, you want Facebook to become *more* like 4chan?

      *shakes head*

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  4. Not NLP by Psycizo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Facebook told Inside Facebook that its natural language processing doesn’t detect sentiment, how a Page’s name is being used, or whether the mentioned Page was actually the focus of the update. Page owners may not like Facebook linking to their Page if a post isn’t actually what a user was discussing or if it is being talked about negatively.

    That makes it a keyword search. Natural Language Processing implies that it intelligently parses the text to locate the topic, this is Dumb Processing.

  5. Re:7 friends posted about "Google." by sg_oneill · · Score: 2

    I've yet to see it work well. It grouped a tonne of posts together that had wikipedia links for no reason other than wikipedia, and in another it gouped a bunch of posts together about australian electronic musician Tomas Ford together, then decided it was about Ford Motorcars (which apparently has deeply annoyed the somewhat anticorporate musician right off)

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    Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  6. LaTeX by lahvak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If I and several of my friends have a discussion about LaTeX, I wonder which page will it get associated with. Or vice versa.

    May result in some amusing situations.

    --
    AccountKiller
  7. this could go so wrong by PJ6 · · Score: 2

    There are a lot of existing examples

    Story: One toddler dead, another critical after house fire.
    Ad: Burn, baby, burn!

    The inevitability of inappropriateness... can ya feel it?