the all-thing | 2010-09-04 16:22:24 -0400 ========================================== A brilliant idea ---------------- Date: August 24, 2008 9:13pm Author: William Morgan Labels: classification URL: http://all-thing.net/old30.txt Filter comments which contain incorrect punctuation or misspellings [1]. In this case it's YouTube comments (and apparently I'm not the only one who has a problem describing them without using the word "cesspool"), but frankly Reddit could use it just as well. The results are compelling [2], there's a very strong correlation between comment stupidity and poor spelling/punctuation. This is brilliant in its simplicity, and it would be interesting to see how this compares to an approach using StupidFilter [3], which I guess is some kind of binary SVM classifier. Advantages: 1. Far more debuggable and understandable than the output of SVM or a Bayesian classifier. 2. Much quicker to execute! 3. Wide-spread usage would have a positive effect on society as a whole. [1] http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/youtube-comment-snob/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/waxpancake/2790444683/--waddayaknow [3] stupidfilter.org This delicious text version served up by Whisper .