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:

PS: Incase you are looking for a list of stop words for different languages here is a good list – http://members.unine.ch/jacques.savoy/clef/

NOTE: A feed that has not been encountered by our system ever before should be summarized in a couple of minutes.

On the whole with Dygest, reading blogs has now become much faster, much more concise and consuming information has become a great deal easier. Imagine the time saved reading the summarized version as compared to the original post (also you are not overwhelmed with useless information). See for yourself below:

Original Post

Summarized Post

While you might have the urge to head over to Dygest and summarize your entire subscription list on Google Reader, I would recommend reading this post a bit further for some real cool stuff we have in store. If you must though – click here to Dygest.

Summarizing Your Twitter Links

Readtwit is a really cool service launched recently, which extracts links from your twitter feed and packages them in a clean RSS format. The awesome combination of Readtwit along with Dygest yields a summarized twitter feed delivered to your favorite feed reader.

Steps to get a summarized twitter feed:

(1) Sign into Readtwit.
(2) Copy the link on the ‘Get me the feed’ button:

More To Come

This is just an experimental release of Dygest and so do send in your feedback on the summaries and help us improve. In the coming months we are working on improving the algorithms and churning out other great applications of Dygest (there is something really cool in the works). So while we are busy teaching computers to read, Dygest your feeds – because reading less is reading more.

Follow us on twitter – @dygest

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):

click to enlarge

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 (:

click to enlarge

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.

I have just started to scratch the surface of Natural Language Processing for my next project (involving NLP and Twitter – details to follow) and I already have a dozen questions bothering me. I shall attempt to put forth a few of the ideas and questions in this post. Lets talk briefly about the structure of language. Language has different levels of structure:

1. dicourse – group of sentences
2. sentences
3. phrases
4. words
5. and so on…

Between the ‘sentences’ and ‘words’ lies the syntactic structure of language. This syntactic structure is built using the parts of speech of the words: nouns, verbs, etc. Words are grouped into phrases whose formation is governed by the grammar rules, for example:

Sentence -> ‘Noun Phrase’ . ‘Verb Phrase’
‘Noun Phrase’ -> Determiner . Adjective . Noun
‘Verb Phrase’ -> Verb . ‘Noun Phrase’

A sentence is grammatically correct if it adheres to the grammar of the language (like described above). With just the above knowledge about language (something you might have learnt in the 5th grade) we can see that for a candidate sentence to make sense in some language, it has to be composed of meaningful components and these components have to be in some specific order for it to logically make sense.

Grammar of Thought

This has led me to ponder if an analogous grammar exists for ‘thought’. Our thoughts can also be broken down into meaningful components and the components here also have to follow some implicit ordering for the ‘thought’ to make sense. If you think about the way you think, you will notice that as you run from one thought to another there is some logical connection between them just as between the sentences in a paragraph. If we could somehow get a formal representation of this grammar, wouldn’t it enable machines to think?

Language and Thought

There is enough literature out there which links the structure of language with the structure of thought. Benjamin Whorf states in his writings:

the structure of a human being’s language influences the manner in which he understands reality and behaves with respect to it

Thus, human cognition is based on the structure of language which in turn is the grammar defining the language. Hence a machine capable of generating sequence of grammatically correct sentences which also fit together logically (discourse), should have some ability of cognition. Even the Turing test uses natural language as a test for some level of cognition. Is this perspective of Natural Language Processing as a means of provisioning cognition to a machine, correct? Could this be another path for achieving artificial intelligence? I would love to get an answer to this from NLP experts out there.

Or is it just one of my other posts which don’t make sense because its 3am and I’m half asleep?