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Bleeding Edge

by Mike Masnick

Fri, Dec 26th 2003 12:36pm





Computers That Can Paraphrase

from the who-needs-writers? dept

If you read enough news articles, you begin to notice certain similarities and patterns, such that certain lines practically write themselves. Now, some computer science researchers are working on a program that might write those sentences itself. Actually, the system is designed to take news articles and try to paraphrase them. With simple, straightforward, short articles it appears to do a pretty good job, but can't handle longer or more complex stories. Certainly seems like an interesting project that has a variety of potential uses, from creating automated summaries of stories to providing alternative phrasing. Just imagine, a few years from now, instead of just having spell check, grammar checks and thesauruses, you might be able to replace whole phrases in Word documents with suggested alternatives, making our writing blander than ever before.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    computational linguistics

    identicon
    sylvie chen, Dec 26th, 2003 @ 5:14pm

    Being able to reparaphrase a sentence automatically with a computer could be a very useful tool for smoking plagiarism to cover your trail of sources. However, a more telling example of the limitations of computational linguistics and translation can be found in experimenting with Babelfish.

    [1] take a passage in English and translate it to another language. Pass back and forth juggling the results between the two languages.

    [2]take same passage and do a stir-fry by passing from one language to the next without reusing a language. Pass result back to original language.

    Here is an example of [juggling] after 5 iterations of english to spanish and back

    original phrase: When I ride a horse backwards, the view is what the horse chose to see. So what I see is what the horse has seen and not the reverse
    result:When amount a horse the other way around, the vision is what the horse chose to see. What I see is so what it has seen the horse and not the misfortune

    Here is an example of stir-fry] starting with same english passage, translating to german to french back to english 3 times

    result:When amount A horse the OTHER way around, the vision is what the horse chose ton lake. What I lake is so what it has lakes the horse and emergency the misfortune

    You can try this yourself at: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    remember this sort of thing from IBM...

    identicon
    mhh5, Dec 26th, 2003 @ 5:33pm

    [a href=http://www.trl.ibm.com/projects/langtran/abst_e.htm>IBM has had a project looking to do this for a few years...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    remember this sort of thing from IBM...

    identicon
    mhh5, Dec 26th, 2003 @ 5:33pm

    IBM has had a project looking to do this for a few years...

    Oops, should always preview...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    FuzzyBondageCuffs, Dec 27th, 2003 @ 3:07pm

    It sure seems like this would make things easier for cheating in school, and what America really needs is more stupid kids getting passed.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Re: No Subject Given

    identicon
    alternatives, Dec 27th, 2003 @ 8:29pm

    stupid kids getting passed.

    So long as schools are a 'state sponsered daycare' for the under 18 crowd, the manditory passing will continue.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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