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:

Now lets consider a sample spam text: “Find sexy girls and guys at xyz.com”. The simplest classifier (lets assume Bayesian text classifier) will start to crumble once the spammer changes the text to “fin d sex y girl s an d guy s a t xyz.co m”. So you will label and retrain your classifier to catch this new trick.

To get out of this vicious reactive cycle, you need to test your model proactively against the possible techniques a spammer could come up with to get away. This is where comes in YODA (acronym for Overly Determined Abuser), a genetic programming based model of a spammer I built (yes we have 20% time as well) to break our spam detection models. As any other genetic algorithm framework, it needs implementations of fitness functions and genome functions. The idea is to model characteristics of a spammer (variables that a spammer can manipulate) as genome functions. The genome functions represent the minimalist change that can be made to the text. For instance, changing the case of characters, modifying sentence delimiters, modifying word delimiters etc. The genome functions need not be just text modification functions but could also represent other attributes of a spammer (like IP etc). The fitness functions represent the criteria the spammer is trying to optimize i.e. to get past the filters with minimal distortions to the spam text. This could be the edit distance combined with the score returned by the model/filter.

Once the fitness function and many such genome functions have been defined, you can set these spam bots free to undergo selection, crossover and mutation. In the end (when you decide to stop the evolution), you will end up with bots that are far more complex than just the basic genome functions defined. The transformations to the original text might be beyond what you could have thought of testing against.

Following are some results of this model on the same spam text using the above mentioned basic genome functions:

- F.ind.s.exy g.irls.a.nd.g.uys.a.t.x.yz.com
- f iñd s exy gi rls ã ñd g úys a t xy z.çom
- FI ND sE Xy Gir Ls anD gu yS AT XyZ. COM
- Find_sexy girls and_guys at_xyz.com

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.

This is a follow-up post of The Monkey Just Got Delicious – I. The app is not yet public for the reasons mentioned in part I. As I had mentioned, my goal was to generate a tag cloud for the search results. Well, search monkey does not allow you to spit out arbitrary html, thus making it difficult to render a tag cloud. After much thought I settled for a color coded tag cloud (as in the screenshot below). You will notice the color of the tags gradually fading (darker shade means that the tag is more popular).

Got feedback, will listen.

[UPDATE] New tag cloud UI for deliciousify can be viewed here

[UPDATE] The search monkey app is currently disabled for public use as it was hitting the delicious rate limit. Hence it will remain as a prototype for now. BTW the delicious team is working on their own search monkey app and I bet its going to be much cooler.

I’m a big fan and an avid user of Yahoo! Search Monkey. So this weekend I decided to write myself a search monkey application that I have always wished for. Well, we all will agree that nothing beats human created metadata and what better metadata about search results can there be than the vast and rich knowledge stored in bookmarking services. My search monkey application deals with enriching the organic search results from Yahoo! with metadata from del.icio.us.

Sometimes the search summary does not provide a useful insight into the contents of the search result (as seen below). The only way users ascertain relevance is by clicking on the result and figuring it out themselves. Wouldn’t it be better if the contents of the result could be summarized by just a few words – keywords that highlight broadly what the document talks about. Deliciousify (as seen below) aims to solve this problem by listing the top tags about a search result from del.icio.us, along with its popularity (number of people who have bookmarked it). In the future, I plan to display a tag cloud for the results. Give it a try and send any comments/feedback my way.