What You Comment Is What You See (WYCIWYS) is a Flickr hack that harnesses the comments of photos to determine the attributes/properties of the photo that people are talking about. It also gives a sentiment score (+ve) for each attribute to help a user gauge what other users find most interesting about a photo. Following are some outputs for WSCIWYS (click to zoom):

What the ####!

My hack (Bleep) for the Yahoo! Spring ’11 Hackday is yet another natural language hack that tries to remove the profanity from a comment without altering the semantics of the content. In brief, removing the profanity word from the content makes the parse tree less probable. The algorithm tries to alter this improbable parse tree to find the best local parse tree.

Following are some corrections suggested by Bleep:

I think that search is undergoing a paradigm shift – its no longer about who presents the best ten blue links but now more about presenting the answers upfront. Dfacto (pronounced as ‘de facto‘, Latin for ‘by [the] fact‘) is aimed at addressing this issue. A large percentage (nearly 68%) of queries are informational queries – one where the searcher knows what she’d like to do or find but does not know how this can be achieved. Dfacto is aimed primarily at addressing this class of queries by presenting a set of facts associated with the query/topic to the searcher. It uses natural language algorithms to get facts that are most “semantically” related to the query. In lay terms, it literally tries to understand your query and the results. I’ll save the algorithmic details for another post. The few examples below show how it works:

Disclaimer: This is a work in progress, so you might notice a few ‘facts’ that are irrelevant to the query.

Lets say the searcher is (losing hair and) looking for causes of hair loss. Normally he/she would need to click through a bunch of links to get an overview on the causes. This hack on the other hand makes life a bit easier by presenting the causes upfront (click to enlarge):

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Along with the facts, we also list the source from where it was extracted. Alternatively, the searcher can also select a bunch of facts he/she thinks are relevant and refine the search. This in turn would yield a new set of ‘web results’ along with new refined and related ‘facts’.

Another example (one which I particularly like) is a query about ‘table manners’. This precisely lists a set of etiquette’s to follow at the table (click to enlarge).

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Alternatively, Dfacto also serves well as a product research tool. A query for ‘iphone 3gs’ yeilds (click to enlarge):

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On another note, if you have a date in the coming weeks you might be interested in reading the list below (:

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Happy hacking!

For the last couple of days, I and @sudheer_624 have been busy working on this hack for a Yahoo! Hackday. Although still a prototype, the hack has turned out to be interesting so we thought of putting it out for others to play around with.

Dygest (pronounced as ‘digest’ – thanks to @bluesmoon) is aimed at changing the conventional way of displaying search context via a snippet to a more informative, machine generated document summary. There two kinds of relevance for evaluating search results:

• Vertical relevance: determined by the ranking algorithms.
• Horizontal relevance: the contextual information made available to the user about the result – Searchmonkey is a good initiative on this front.

The current way of displaying this context is via a snippet of text under every result. This snippet shows the neighborhood of the occurrence of the query terms. Usually this information is not rich enough for a searcher to make the right judgement about the result. This causes the searcher to switch back and forth between the documents and the search results if the the page is not relevant. This can be frustrating at times.

Dygest aims to solve this by either replacing or enhancing the current search snippet with a summary of the result page. At its core lies a summarization engine which figures out what the *real* content of the page is (distinguishing it from the other junk like surrounding text, navigational text, comments etc) and then performs text summarization on this content. The summary of the page is then displayed to the user via the appropriate interface. How cool is that?

The user no longer needs to click on irrelevant links. He/She can perceive the theme/important facts of the page from right within the results page. The other advantage of this is that it gives the user a good overview of the query topic – he no longer needs to spend time reading many long documents but rather read a few summaries from the top results to get a good overview of the subject. This is particularly well suited for mobile devices where its frustrating to switch back and forth between pages and the search results. This is also fit for news articles where we just need the important facts about the story.

Well, here is an example to convince you. A search for ‘Carol Bartz’ yields the following result which at the first glance is not at all informative.

Enhancing the existing view with an abstract of the page helps gauge the content and theme of the document. This would now look like:

Dygest outputs the following summaries for the query ‘Iran‘ restricted to Yahoo! News:

And following for ‘Obama stimulus plan‘:

Currently, Dygest has two interfaces – (1) a search interface powered by yahoo boss and (2) a searchmonkey plugin. Its just a prototype so be kind and don’t be too judgmental.

Start dygesting here.

Click here to try PARTICLE

Presently you need to provide PARTICLE with your del.icio.us username, which it uses to analyze your *interests* and present you with recent news stories you may like. It works well if you have a decent number of bookmarks in del.icio.us. As I mentioned, the project is at a very rudimentary stage, so don’t feel disappointed by the results (ah! the unlucky few). I encourage you to play around with the app and recommend it to others to try. I’ll be making many changes/additions in the coming weeks.

Test drive PARTICLE at http://particle.semanticvoid.com. Kindly leave your feedback/comments/suggestions in the comments or send me an email at ‘anand at semanticvoid.com’.

[UPDATE] Yahoo! Research has a similar project called Garçon.

My good friend and fellow Barcamp organizer, Rohit Srivastwa, came up with this brilliant idea last Barcamp. He has been attending various hacker conventions like Black Hat and thought that it would be appropriate for hosting an event on similar lines in India. ClubHack is scheduled to be hosted in Pune (India) sometime around this December. You can head over and register for the following events:

• Call for paper [click here]
• Call for demo [click here]

Or you can register yourself for attending the convention.