I just got my weekend entertainment from http://bossy.appspot.com. It's an "ask" app inspired by Ask MSR, a paper written 7 years ago for TREC. (I'm not sure the authors ever intended or expected such a thing, but there it is.)
For 50 lines of API code, it's pretty impressive-- and when it's wrong it's usually entertaining. It does well on short and simple word-association queries, like "Who is Batman?" or "What is xkcd?", and seems to do reasonably well on easily-searchable names such as my own.
It even has some political opinions. Try "Who is the worst president in history?", "Who lost the 2004 election?", or "What is the United States?" and you'll get some cynical answers. It's also pacifist, at least for certain queries.
It tends to get snarky when asked other binary queries. I was chagrined when I asked it "Which is better, CMU or MIT?" It also defects when asked to decide between Microsoft and Google, or between OU and OSU. However, does have a preference with respect to the statistics cults.
Alas, it does not seem to be immune to spam.
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2 comments:
Wow, the CMU vs. MIT one is funny.
Interestingly in recent years TREC QA systems have moved towards wikipedia as THE knowledge source to verify answers.
This probably points to the fact that we still cannot deal with huge amounts of unstructured data as on the web. We are happier processing semi structured sources like the wikipedia.
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