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How Facebook Built Natural Language Into Graph Search 39

Posted by samzenpus
from the keep-looking dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook's Graph Search is an ambitious project: give users the ability to search through the social network's vast webs of data via natural-language queries. But that's much easier said—so to speak—than done. Although human beings think nothing of speaking in 'natural' language, a machine must not only learn all the grammatical building-blocks we take for granted—it needs to compensate for the quirks and errors that inevitably pop up in the course of speech. The Facebook team tasked with building Graph Search also knew that the alternate option, keyword-based search, wasn't a viable one. 'Keywords, which usually consist of nouns or proper nouns, can be nebulous in their intent,' Facebook engineering manager Xiao Li wrote in an April 29 posting on Facebook's blog. 'For example, "friends Facebook" can mean "friends on Facebook," "friends who work at Facebook Inc," or "friends who like Facebook the page."' That left the team with building a natural-language interface. The posting digs deep into the elements of the backend, including everything from 'parse trees' to a lexical analysis system."

Comment: Re:It's to bad (Score 1) 546

by eagee (#43493077) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It
This is such bullshit. Women *were* the first programmers b/c it was a natural transition from touch typing to writing code. You know, women like the one who created the Liskoff Substitution Principle!? You know, Barbara Liskoff? Women were some of the most significant innovators in the field!

The reason women aren't in programming anymore is because there was a massive campaign to make programming a male dominated profession in the 60's and it's just stuck since then. It's a shame that you have such a bigoted, short signed, idiotic attitude about women. ( ...or even intense thinking? what the fuck is wrong with you and the idiots that modded you up as "insightful"?)

Comment: Queue stupid comments from team creationism! (Score 0, Flamebait) 422

by eagee (#43294965) Attached to: Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss
Why is it that with only 4 posts up (when I wrote this) I'm already pissed off? I guess I already know just how-many-stupid-things are about to be written here, and 'resigning to it in silent fury... Debating climate deniers is like getting a beer with a bunch of birthers (literally). Science has an amazing way of reinforcing crazy stupid by presenting contradicting, independently verifiable facts, sometimes it's too painful to watch.

Comment: Environmental Tipping Point? Slash taxes! (Score 1) 583

by eagee (#42886429) Attached to: Obama Proposes 'Meaningful Progress' On Climate Change
I've been waiting for someone to address the serious shit we're all about to find ourselves in, and I'm glad Obama did it. I'm shocked and appalled at the stupidity that's been modded up in this thread. Here we have slashdotters focusing more on government spending like a bunch of nutters instead of the fact that we're on the cusp of an environmental tipping point. What happened slashdot? When'd you get so short sighted?

Comment: Re:Throw 'em out! (Score 1) 108

by eagee (#42872347) Attached to: EU Data Protection Proposal Taken Word For Word From US Lobbyists

Anything you do between elections to influence members of the parliament is lobbying. Do you really want to get rid of that?

Um, when that lobbying is for the benefit of a single multinational corporation instead of the greater good of the people served by the legislature - then yes, I absolutely want to get rid of that.

Software

LibreOffice 4 Released 249

Posted by timothy
from the whole-numbers-is-best-numbers dept.
Titus Andronicus writes "LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released. Some of the changes are for developers: an improved API, a new graphics stack, migrating German code comments to English, and moving from Apache 2.0 to LGPLv3 & MPLv2. Some user-facing changes are: better interoperability with other software, some functional & UI improvements, and some performance gains."

Fortune favors the lucky.

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