Facebook Now Using Natural Language Processing

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."

Comments

Back to Usenet?

[zmughal]

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.".

Natural language?

[Hamster Lover]

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

Not NLP

[Psycizo]

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.

Re:image replies

[Trogre]

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

*shakes head*

LaTeX

[lahvak]

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.