6 ms·
What on earth? I know we all love a good MS pile-on, but if this contest weren't being run by Microsoft, it'd be an academic shared task with results to be wri
by blahedo 16y ago
What on earth? I know we all love a good MS pile-on, but if this contest weren't being run by Microsoft, it'd be an academic shared task with results to be written up and published in a workshop of some conference, probably ACL or EMNLP (which will probably still happen, actually), for no prize money and yet with most or all of the authors open-sourcing their research code anyway.
And this isn't even substantially different from putting together OSS to do the job; even GPLed code lets MSR "use, review, assess, test, and otherwise analyze" it.
EDIT: To be even clearer, the idea of a shared task, run a bit like a contest (with a validation corpus and a secret test corpus, and a designated winner at the end), is really well established in the Natural Language Processing community, and the usual expectation is that you publish at the end. When I say in my first paragraph that this "'d be an academic shared task", I'm not speculating. The remarkable thing about the MSR contest is not the publication requirement, but that they're paying out money at all.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mseebach 16y agoEither that, or it might get build in one of these newfangled "start-ups". Good luck buying, for $10,000, a company that has a spellchecker better than Microsofts.
- chc 16y agoGood luck building a company around a spell-checker, no matter what level of quality, in a world where most people already have Office.
- rhizome 16y agoFor word processing, sure, but Thunderbird and Swype are two examples of software that I use on a daily basis that have uses for spell checking.
- derefr 16y agoA sufficiently-smart spell-checker would be indistinguishable from a translation aide, sentiment analyzer, voice-recognition classifier, etc. Basically, whatever tech is required to make spell-checkers better has other uses than spell-checking, and those might be valuable.
- adrianN 16y agoA sufficiently-smart spell-checker would be indistinguishable from an artificial intelligence. A company producing one of those things would make billions, but not by selling a spell-checker.
- derefr 16y agoI didn't mean it would be indistinguishable from all of those things (because it is an AGI and could act as any of those things if it wished), but rather that it would likely have to incorporate one or more of those things to spell better. I have a feeling sentiment analysis alone would be a pretty good next step for spelling/grammar-checking.
- alextp 16y agoThe founder of http://afterthedeadline.com/ http://afterthedeadline.com/ hangs out in hn, so I think you should take this issue up with him.
- calvinf 16y agoAnd I'm guessing he received more than $10,000 from Automattic (WordPress.com) when they acquired him / his company. http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadline-acquired/ http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadli...
- chc 16y agoJust to be clear, that's more than just a spell checker.
- Tichy 16y agoI am on no universities payroll, nobody pays me to do research.