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Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

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31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama was the 44th (really 43rd if you count by people instead of presidencies) President.

Those queries don't work either.

You're right, it's on the roadmap for Cortex along with: 1) ordered queries ("Who is the 44th president?") 2) comparison queries ("Is Bill Gates older than Steve Ballmer?") 3) simple logic queries (AND/OR) 4) reducing overfitting (the system's tendency to respond with any answer even though it may not have an accurate one)

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#32
post #12

"We're make sense of dark data to help companies in technology, law, medicine, and government extract information from text." Ignore the grammar error, you're helping government extract information from text? Where exactly? Do you mean the NSA? Do you mean helping the government look at public internet written commentary to track citizens?

Thanks for catching that! We don't do anything like that, in fact, we don't work with the government at all right now. We know that there is a huge application of this technology in the government beyond the Department of Defense. For example, large corpuses of text data other government agencies might need to process like the Census Bureau, the IRS, etc.

That's evil. I'll hate you if you help the IRS.

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#34
post #33

Are you planning on building any Natural Language Generation API's? Would love to be able to submit a set of data points and receive a sentence.

Thanks for the question. Yes, we are! Signup as a developer and you will be notified when we release them. We'd also love to understand your use case so drop me a line at ajay@plasticity.ai if you're interested in talking.

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#35
This passage (from another one of the articles on top of HN right now (https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null#tpw)) generates an error when trying to use the Sapien demo: "As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.

But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it’s often rejected as input in a web form."

Maybe it's the use of the word `Null`? Not sure, but love what you're doing and thought I'd let you know about this.

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#37
post #36

Will the document summarization API summarize and rewrite the content or just a summary of the original content without a rewrite?

Yes, it will perform abstractive summarization (re-writing the language in the text) vs. just extractive summarization, which just pulls out high-importance sentences from text.

But we'll offer both just in case.

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#38
post #35

This passage (from another one of the articles on top of HN right now ( https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null#tpw) ) generates an error when trying to use the Sapien demo: "As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plum…

Uh-oh, looks like it's the non-ASCII characters that are crashing our interface. We'll fix this. Thanks for bringing it to our attention and the kind comment!

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#39
post #35

This passage (from another one of the articles on top of HN right now ( https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null#tpw) ) generates an error when trying to use the Sapien demo: "As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plum…

Uh-oh, looks like it's the non-ASCII characters that are crashing our interface. We'll fix this. Thanks for bringing it to our attention and the kind comment!

Of course! I love these launch posts, they are one of my favorite parts of HN. One other question for you, sparked in part by your response - any plans on your roadmap to support any other (non-Western?) languages for any of the APIs? Chinese, perhaps?

Re: Launch HN: Plasticity (YC S17) – APIs for human-like natural language interfaces

#40
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh-oh, looks like it's the non-ASCII characters that are crashing our interface. We'll fix this. Thanks for bringing it to our attention and the kind comment!

Of course! I love these launch posts, they are one of my favorite parts of HN. One other question for you, sparked in part by your response - any plans on your roadmap to support any other (non-Western?) languages for any of the APIs? Chinese, perhaps?

We've done some experimental work with other languages (specifically Chinese). We think the Cortex Knowledge Graph API will do well when moved into other language domains, but the Sapien Language Engine will likely require full-rewrites of its core code for non-Romance languages.
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