7 ms·

HK social media users writing phonetically spelled posts to shut out trolls

170 points by s_Hogg 7y ago

johnzim 7y ago
Very clever. That said, there’s plenty of HKers who were happy to be govt stooges who speak Cantonese and can write English.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.
  - krasin 7y ago
    Only for a little while. It will take a few days to make a browser extension to fix this.
    - s_Hogg 7y ago
      What sort of browser extension are you thinking of that would only take a couple of days?
    - realusername 7y ago
      There's nothing which will translate that as far as I know, it's an entirely different problem than chinese characters since Cantonese is a separate language and the phonetics are not even standardized in these messages so there's no 1 to 1 mapping to characters either.
      - robjan 7y ago
        If you type the phonetic words in using the Google Keyboard in JyutPing mode, you will usually get the correct Chinese characters. The thing that would defeat this, though, is the deliberate introduction of very colloquial Chinglish puns.
- ttggyyuqw 7y ago
  There are also over 100 million Cantonese speakers in China. It’s like the interesting fact there are more Mongolians in China than in Mongolia.
s_Hogg 7y ago
I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.
- awake 7y ago
  How quickly could China create a dataset to translate this into Cantonese though? Probably in a year or less. It’s a game of cat and mouse and the cat will win in the end.
  - s_Hogg 7y ago
    I thought the idea of a game of cat and mouse is that you never actually reach a conclusion? Pace the obvious and awesome power of the Chinese surveillance state, nothing is foregone. Edit: it's true that you could eventually translate the literal stuff back into Chinese characters, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean things are predetermined in a wider sense.
- throwawy123 7y ago
  No, you can actually type this straight into Google Translate and it will work fine. After selecting Chinese as the language, you have to set the input method as "Cantonese." Of course, Google Translate is banned in China. ;) This isn't a secret code or anything; it's a standard romanization that almost everyone who learns Cantonese formally will learn. The thing is---formal education in Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages is banned in schools in China. Mainlanders that speak Cantonese as a primary language often don't even know how to use it (I talked to a Cantonese-speaking girl from Zhuhai, and she was like "Can you show me what Jyutping looks like?" Bizarre). It's pretty smart, and a bit of a slap in the face to the establishment, which has been forcing Mandarin down people's throats for the past 50 years or so.
  - s_Hogg 7y ago
    Yeah, I just tried it and didn't know which characters to pick after the initial "heung gong" in "heung gong ya gan yau". So even if it doesn't actually break automatic translation, it does break the user like you say :)
probablybroken 7y ago
I remember this being similar to the reason claimed for the use of leet speak back in the day (i.e, that it prevented searching of messages by 'the man' ); Interesting to see something so similar actually being practically applied in the present.
hardmaru 7y ago
Hi! Here is some information about romanisation of Cantonese if you are interested: Romanisation system for Cantonese has an interesting history! Yale romanisation system [1] is (IMO) the most readable and also later on refined as Jyutping [2], another method used in more academic contexts which IMO is less readable (both used in GBoard as Cantonese input methods). However most persons and place names in HK use older system [3] developed in 1880s by Christian missionaries. When people use Cantonese romanisation as part of their casual text chats on instant messaging or social media platforms, it’s usually a mix of both systems [1, 3], but rarely [2] but without the tone information (so lots of many-to-one mappings), mixed in with bits of English, making it hard to understand (even for a local Hong Kong person) without having good prior context of the entire conversation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Romanization_(Cantonese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Romanization_(Cantone...
- s_Hogg 7y ago
  Somewhat off topic: any chance you know how come Google doesn't have an explicitly cantonese model for translation?
  - spacehunt 7y ago
    Not a Googler so I can only guess. But it seems like Google did try to treat Cantonese as a Chinese variant in the past, eventually they dropped it probably because they realised they're too different. I know Google is actively working on the Cantonese version of Google Assistant, though not sure when it'll be officially released.
    - toastal 7y ago
      It is a variant of Chinese though. Chinese is a language family, not a language -- which includes Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, et. al.
koonsolo 7y ago
As a side note: If that would happen here in Flanders, not even Dutch speakers would be able to translate it. We have so many local dialects with their own pronunciation, and region bounded words, that only local people would understand what is written.
caf 7y ago
Aw hafta r'menbadis iffwea genvayed.
- yomly 7y ago
  I'll have to remember this if we get fired?
  - tomthecreator 7y ago
    Probably "invaded".
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
There is state-sponsored warfare occurring on the internet right now. As with all war, each side desires a specific outcome; they're influencing en masse - the people they want - to achieve their outcome.
loocsinus 7y ago
Hong Kong is not the only place where people speak Cantonese. The entire region of GuangDong (Canton) speak this dialect. Do they believe all "trolls" speak Mandarin?
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Its just desperation when the solutions are nonexistent or inefficient Not dissimilar to calling everyone that disagrees with you a Russian bot, which was very prevalent in the states for a few years
- robjan 7y ago
  The people of Guangdong will usually tell you that South Chinese people are generally apolitical and tend to care more about money and good food.
charlesdaniels 7y ago
I was lucky to have the chance to take a natural language processing course in the spring from a professor who was very knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. Sentiment extraction, semantic meaning extraction, categorization... these are all really hard problems (to do automatically) even on properly spelled and grammatically correct text. I would imagine they are even harder in Chinese, which as I understand it has several different writing systems. The HK protesters are clearly quite clever. If they keep using different obfuscation schemes for text, I could see it forcing the mainland to use human beings to read every post. Which I'm sure they have the resources to do, but it's still more expensive than using a machine. Some strategies I would expect to be effective: * Using alternative phonetic encoding (i.e. what is shown in the article, using Latin letters to spell out sounds rather than words) * Homoglyph attacks * Using deliberately incorrect or ambiguous grammatical structure * Using deliberately incorrect spacing and punctuation (for example "m ee t. me;? b!y th e do.,c?s a!.t; m id ni;ght" will completely bewilder all the parsing packages I'm aware of) * Convert the text to images and post those, possibly adding graphical text which will confuse OCR packages Mix and match for even more fun! There are also lots and lots of stenographic techniques, but those are a lot less accessible to laypeople. I'm not familiar with NLP tools and techniques available for Chinese, but most parsers/taggers for English aren't really written with adversarial inputs in mind. It would probably be possible to deliberately construct valid (or at least decipherable to a human) English text that would crash the common tools available. As an aside, the articles that keep coming out over the HK protester's tactics are starting to seem a lot like Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"[1], which is available for free, and definitely worth a read. 1 - https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.pdf https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_B...
BerislavLopac 7y ago
A mandatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

170 points by s_Hogg 7y ago

Very clever. That said, there’s plenty of HKers who were happy to be govt stooges who speak Cantonese and can write English.

ARandomerDude 7y ago
True, but it no doubt greatly reduces the amount of government involvement in this area.
- krasin 7y ago
  Only for a little while. It will take a few days to make a browser extension to fix this.
  - s_Hogg 7y ago
    What sort of browser extension are you thinking of that would only take a couple of days?
  - realusername 7y ago
    There's nothing which will translate that as far as I know, it's an entirely different problem than chinese characters since Cantonese is a separate language and the phonetics are not even standardized in these messages so there's no 1 to 1 mapping to characters either.
    - robjan 7y ago
      If you type the phonetic words in using the Google Keyboard in JyutPing mode, you will usually get the correct Chinese characters. The thing that would defeat this, though, is the deliberate introduction of very colloquial Chinglish puns.
ttggyyuqw 7y ago
There are also over 100 million Cantonese speakers in China. It’s like the interesting fact there are more Mongolians in China than in Mongolia.

s_Hogg 7y ago

I tried feeding some of the phonetically spelled stuff into google translate and it was completely lost at sea. So no worries about the claim this could stuff up NLP/search, then.

awake 7y ago
How quickly could China create a dataset to translate this into Cantonese though? Probably in a year or less. It’s a game of cat and mouse and the cat will win in the end.
- s_Hogg 7y ago
  I thought the idea of a game of cat and mouse is that you never actually reach a conclusion? Pace the obvious and awesome power of the Chinese surveillance state, nothing is foregone. Edit: it's true that you could eventually translate the literal stuff back into Chinese characters, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean things are predetermined in a wider sense.
throwawy123 7y ago
No, you can actually type this straight into Google Translate and it will work fine. After selecting Chinese as the language, you have to set the input method as "Cantonese." Of course, Google Translate is banned in China. ;) This isn't a secret code or anything; it's a standard romanization that almost everyone who learns Cantonese formally will learn. The thing is---formal education in Cantonese and other non-Mandarin Chinese languages is banned in schools in China. Mainlanders that speak Cantonese as a primary language often don't even know how to use it (I talked to a Cantonese-speaking girl from Zhuhai, and she was like "Can you show me what Jyutping looks like?" Bizarre). It's pretty smart, and a bit of a slap in the face to the establishment, which has been forcing Mandarin down people's throats for the past 50 years or so.
- s_Hogg 7y ago
  Yeah, I just tried it and didn't know which characters to pick after the initial "heung gong" in "heung gong ya gan yau". So even if it doesn't actually break automatic translation, it does break the user like you say :)

probablybroken 7y ago

I remember this being similar to the reason claimed for the use of leet speak back in the day (i.e, that it prevented searching of messages by 'the man' ); Interesting to see something so similar actually being practically applied in the present.

hardmaru 7y ago

Hi! Here is some information about romanisation of Cantonese if you are interested: Romanisation system for Cantonese has an interesting history! Yale romanisation system [1] is (IMO) the most readable and also later on refined as Jyutping [2], another method used in more academic contexts which IMO is less readable (both used in GBoard as Cantonese input methods). However most persons and place names in HK use older system [3] developed in 1880s by Christian missionaries. When people use Cantonese romanisation as part of their casual text chats on instant messaging or social media platforms, it’s usually a mix of both systems [1, 3], but rarely [2] but without the tone information (so lots of many-to-one mappings), mixed in with bits of English, making it hard to understand (even for a local Hong Kong person) without having good prior context of the entire conversation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Romanization_(Cantonese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Romanization_(Cantone...

s_Hogg 7y ago
Somewhat off topic: any chance you know how come Google doesn't have an explicitly cantonese model for translation?
- spacehunt 7y ago
  Not a Googler so I can only guess. But it seems like Google did try to treat Cantonese as a Chinese variant in the past, eventually they dropped it probably because they realised they're too different. I know Google is actively working on the Cantonese version of Google Assistant, though not sure when it'll be officially released.
  - toastal 7y ago
    It is a variant of Chinese though. Chinese is a language family, not a language -- which includes Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, et. al.

koonsolo 7y ago

As a side note: If that would happen here in Flanders, not even Dutch speakers would be able to translate it. We have so many local dialects with their own pronunciation, and region bounded words, that only local people would understand what is written.

caf 7y ago

Aw hafta r'menbadis iffwea genvayed.

yomly 7y ago
I'll have to remember this if we get fired?
- tomthecreator 7y ago
  Probably "invaded".

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

There is state-sponsored warfare occurring on the internet right now. As with all war, each side desires a specific outcome; they're influencing en masse - the people they want - to achieve their outcome.

loocsinus 7y ago

Hong Kong is not the only place where people speak Cantonese. The entire region of GuangDong (Canton) speak this dialect. Do they believe all "trolls" speak Mandarin?

rolltiide 7y ago
Its just desperation when the solutions are nonexistent or inefficient Not dissimilar to calling everyone that disagrees with you a Russian bot, which was very prevalent in the states for a few years
robjan 7y ago
The people of Guangdong will usually tell you that South Chinese people are generally apolitical and tend to care more about money and good food.

charlesdaniels 7y ago

I was lucky to have the chance to take a natural language processing course in the spring from a professor who was very knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. Sentiment extraction, semantic meaning extraction, categorization... these are all really hard problems (to do automatically) even on properly spelled and grammatically correct text. I would imagine they are even harder in Chinese, which as I understand it has several different writing systems. The HK protesters are clearly quite clever. If they keep using different obfuscation schemes for text, I could see it forcing the mainland to use human beings to read every post. Which I'm sure they have the resources to do, but it's still more expensive than using a machine. Some strategies I would expect to be effective: * Using alternative phonetic encoding (i.e. what is shown in the article, using Latin letters to spell out sounds rather than words) * Homoglyph attacks * Using deliberately incorrect or ambiguous grammatical structure * Using deliberately incorrect spacing and punctuation (for example "m ee t. me;? b!y th e do.,c?s a!.t; m id ni;ght" will completely bewilder all the parsing packages I'm aware of) * Convert the text to images and post those, possibly adding graphical text which will confuse OCR packages Mix and match for even more fun! There are also lots and lots of stenographic techniques, but those are a lot less accessible to laypeople. I'm not familiar with NLP tools and techniques available for Chinese, but most parsers/taggers for English aren't really written with adversarial inputs in mind. It would probably be possible to deliberately construct valid (or at least decipherable to a human) English text that would crash the common tools available. As an aside, the articles that keep coming out over the HK protester's tactics are starting to seem a lot like Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"[1], which is available for free, and definitely worth a read. 1 - https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.pdf https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_B...

BerislavLopac 7y ago

A mandatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth