Existential Threat To Liberalism In Development

If this is turned into a portable program, the NYT is doomed:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding a research project designed to teach computers to scan text and then sort opinion from fact.

The scientists will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and then teach them to tell the difference.

Of course, since this is a Homeland Security project, I might assume that they're trying to save a lot of man-hours poring over millions of documents that might or might not have useful nuggets in them.

Like maybe, the webpages of persons hostile to the U.S.
Or even documents written in Arabic, left behind by some regime-or-other that has since been deposed.
Just my opinion. I'm probably completely wrong.

posted by Laura. at 09:30 PM

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