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Cyber Secretaries Your Average Geek's Dream
Cyber Secretaries Australian IT has an extremely interesting article about smart emailing systems -- no, it's not quite as good as what came into your mind when reading the title; Cyber Secretaries is a bit of an overstatement. Basically, the software can learn to classify your email, based on simple natural language processing (phonemes, stems and basic grammar). There are a few insightfull comments about user feedback; the reinforcement process that guides the learning. One comment stands out though: ""The software is not deterministic, but that's what makes it robust and flexible."" Anyone with AI experience will realise that this is to encourage learning and to prevent local minima. I've coincidentally been looking into filtering and classifying my email over the past few days, as I realised an increasing amount of my time is lost that way. I came to the conclusion that a combination of Eudora's powerful expressions and MailWasher's server filters could do all that for free! All I have to do is set up the regular expressions in a way that makes sense; a bit of trial an error and you're sorted. We'll see how well this learning approach compares to my expert system ;) | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Saturday 29 June, 17:34 Reply
Smart email That sounds interesting. You could probably search through all emails and classify them automatically using a self-organising clustering technique. Also, using semantic networks such as the OpenMind database or OpenCyc could help to classify the information according to common underlying themes. And if you could do that for emails, why not web pages or any other sort of electronic document. This is all very grandiose but I'm not actually sure that it would be useful in practice. Personally I don't receive anything like the quoted 30 emails per day, but I know folks who do get those sorts of volumes on a regular basis and have to spend the first hour or two of the day just reading and responding to emails. Probably the most useful thing that a "cyber seceretary" could do would be to group mails by priority, so that you could deal with the high priority things first and leave the tittle-tattle and obligatory spam deletions until later. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Saturday 29 June, 18:28 Reply