Text Analyser Reveals Emotional Temperature of Novels and Fairy Tales

Beyond that, once an entire corpus of work has been analysed in this way, it becomes possible to compare them in unprecedented depth and detail. For example, Mohammad has analysed all of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and arranged them in order of negative word density. The darkest turns out to be a tale called Gambling Hansel.

via Text Analyser Reveals Emotional Temperature of Novels and Fairy Tales  — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium.

Grading Essays at College Level

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.

Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback.

How Facebook Built Natural Language into Graph Search

The engineers used a weighted context-free grammar (WCFG) to represent Graph Search’s query language. Think of a tree, with the root or base as the “Start” of a particular query. Facebook calls this the “parse tree,” and the various “limbs” branching from the root include verbs, objects, etc. The “leaves” at the top are the terminal symbols, or entities such as users, cities, employers, groups, and the phrases that link those entities together. It’s perhaps easier to diagram than explain:

via How Facebook Built Natural Language into Graph Search.

Grading Essays at College Level

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

via New Test for Computers – Grading Essays at College Level – NYTimes.com.

‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists

Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.

via ‘Robo-reporter’ computer program raises questions about future of journalists.