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.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


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

    computational linguistics

    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

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    mhh5, 26 Dec 2003 @ 5:33pm

    remember this sort of thing from IBM...

    [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...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    mhh5, 26 Dec 2003 @ 5:33pm

    remember this sort of thing from IBM...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    FuzzyBondageCuffs, 27 Dec 2003 @ 3:07pm

    No Subject Given

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

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    alternatives, 27 Dec 2003 @ 8:29pm

    Re: No Subject Given

    stupid kids getting passed.

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

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.