Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely • Hacker News Board

Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#1

Post by mikkiq » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely
labs.foxtype.com

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#2

Post by adhsu01 » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

Nice! Congratulations on putting this out there.

How does this work? What did you use as training data? Do you parse the sentence in any way?

For example, "Hey! It was so so great to see you." gets a 46/100, and 'so' is listed as an impolite word, which is understandable in some contexts but not this one.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#3

Post by pavornyoh » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

Good job first of all.. So out of fun, I typed in "the dudes and dudettes were here" to test your system. The neutral responses as rewrites were a bit worrying. You may want to look into it. Congrats on it.

EDIT: @Mikkiq, thank you for taking those words out promptly and correcting it. Cool site.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#4

Post by plusepsilon » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

adhsu01 wrote: post #2

Nice! Congratulations on putting this out there. How does this work? What did you use as training data? Do you parse the sentence in any way? For example, "Hey! It was so so great to see you." gets a 46/100, and 'so' is listed as an impolite word, which is understandable in some contexts but not this one.

Thanks. Yes, we built our own training set.

Catching all the different senses of the word is a hard problem. There's always something to improve.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#5

Post by jval » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more cool NLP technology out there!

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#6

Post by SixSigma » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

It's not very British :)

Apparently "Pardon my intrusion but may I enquire as to your state of health."

Is neutral and should be replaced by

"Pardon my ingress but may I question as to your government sources of medical treatment."

Which I guess is also more in tune with American politics. Truly is has achieved singularity.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#7

Post by kiddico » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

This was really fun to play around with. its funny how changing a word in one scenario will make you more polite, while in another it'll become the least polite thing ever.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#8

Post by angersock » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

For added good fun, seed it with some Torvalds: https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-ra...

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#9

Post by sswaner » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

Stymied by one of the hardest sentences to parse: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

But, I did find it handled typical sentences very well. Good job.

Re: Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely

#10

Post by drglitch » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #6

It's not very British :) Apparently "Pardon my intrusion but may I enquire as to your state of health." Is neutral and should be replaced by "Pardon my ingress but may I question as to your government sources of medical treatment." Which I guess is also more in tune with American politics. Truly is has achieved singularity.

Great product and lots of fun to play with! The odd edgecases remind me a little of http://translationparty.com/ :)