What would you do with a system that was intelligent enough to analyze a
Wikipedia article along with qualitative human judgments of that article
("brilliant prose") and tell you exactly what the humans meant, even when
they weren't sure themselves?
At least years Wikimania Erik Zachte and I discussed exactly this
possibility. Invariably these discussions lead to the subjective nature of
quality, and quickly diverge to [[Zen and the art of Motorcycle
Maintenance]]. But my colleagues and I have determined that this problem
should be tractable, and have initiated a research program to find out if we
are correct.
What we would like to know is your dreams for such a system, what you would
like it to do, and what you would do with it. To help kick-start your
imaginations, please see the following paper, written by myself, a
psychologist, Trevor Pincock, a linguist, and Laura Rassbach, a computer
scientist. Although we consider our findings to be preliminary, we would
also like to emphasize the phenomenal rate of growth of the field of
[[Natural Language Processing]]. We *will* be able to build the system of
your dreams. We just need to hear them first.
Please note that this paper is a draft. Please do not cite it.
"Exploring the Feasibility of Automatically Rating Online Article Quality"
http://whisper.colorado.edu/RassbachPincockMingus07.pdf
/Brian Mingus
en:User:Alterego <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alterego>