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Kyle Dent in the news
Parsing the Twitterverse: New Algorithms Analyze Tweets
Smarter language processors are helping experts analyze millions of short-text messages from across the Internet
22 July 2011 | Scientific American
by Francie Diep
"But the research tools at scientists’ disposal are highly imperfect. Keyword searches, for example, return many hits but offer a poor sense of overall trends.
Scientists at PARC recently developed one such program. It relies on text processors, called parsers, which are typically tested on news articles. Parsers can distinguish between words and punctuation, label parts of speech and analyze a sentence’s grammatical structure. But 'they don’t do as well on Twitter,' says Kyle Dent, one of the Palo Alto researchers. He and his co-author wrote hundreds of rules to account for hash tags, repeated letters (as in “pleaaaaaase”) and other linguistic features perhaps not common in the Wall Street Journal…
Dent and his colleagues also tried to use their program to distinguish between rhetorical questions and those that require a response. Businesses could use such a program to find what people are asking about their products. In a recent trial, their program classified 68 percent of 2,304 tweets correctly. 'For a brand-new field, that sounds like a decent first attempt,' says Jeffrey Ellen of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which provides intelligence technology to the U.S. Navy."
Enough with the Keyword Searches: New Outlook Plug-In Uses More "Human" Ways of Reeling In Information
Meshin first to apply semantic technology to search tool that scans email, RSS feeds, social networks
28 September 2010 | Meshin
by press release
"Incubated at PARC, a Xerox company, Meshin is part of Xerox's effort to develop technologies that help businesses gain back productivity that has been lost when trying to manage the overload of information bombarding today's knowledge worker."
Make Your Outlook Inbox Smarter with Meshin [INVITES]
30 August 2010 | Mashable
by Christina Warren
"Quick Pitch: Meshin is an Outlook sidebar that organizes information contextually so that you can work faster and smarter.
Genius Idea: Using semantic technology and natural language processing, Meshin can take information from your inbox and connect it with related information on the web and conversations on social networks. Meshin is a Xerox-funded project incubated at PARC, where the Meshin team has worked on developing semantic technologies to create what they call 'context-aware information services'. In other words, this is technology that can go beyond keyword matching and create actual meaning."