Fedora 12 is out!

[Mike Kallies]

William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 02:06:48PM -0500, Mike Kallies wrote:
> 
>> I've filed this as a Zbigniew comment.  Nothing personal I'm sure.  It
>> should all be taken with a bit of tea and a lot of vodka.
> 
> That was how I saw it as well.
> 
>> Slightly off topic, I was thinking about this kind of email the other
>> day.  I mean lots of people send regrettable emails like this....
>>
>> If one could install a Bayesian filter on one's outgoing SMTP server,
>> maybe it could pick out the difference between mean email and not-mean
>> email.  Mean email could be held overnight for review in the morning.
>> Nice mail would go through without delay.
>>
>> We could suggest it to RMS and maybe a few world governments.  It could
>> solve lots of problems in the world.
> 
> The trouble is, how would such a filter discern the difference between
> scathing sarcasm and deferent politeness?

Hello William,

If it could flag it as questionable, then a human could make a decision.

I don't know much about Bayesian methods, but there seems to be a Perl
program which somebody wrote to parse based on words:
http://getpopfile.org

But in this case, aside from cutting out contractions, we've got stark
expressions such as:

"So what?"
"Who cares?"
"I myself"
"do not care"
"and would not"

If one could train based on expressions such as the above, maybe parsing
 on sentences and grammar, it could score expressions based on learned
categories.

Then it would be a matter of making sure the opening and closing tone of
the email are scored consistent.  There's probably a lot of other stuff
which can be measured... I'm not saying it's easy.

This could actually have applications in writing in foreign languages,
aiding people with Asperger's, and just regular daily writing...  Put it
in a grammar checker and it could say rather than just "This is in a
passive style" it could say "Nice people don't use those words" or
"you're being a jerk, please consider contradictory emoticons to lower
the tone, or change the message options to 'flame'."

It'd be cool :-)


-Mike


(and now I'm WAAAAAY off topic)
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