Facebook patents new software that creates a slang dictionary

midian182

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Like many big tech companies, Facebook files a lot of patents. But its latest one, which was granted in February, is raising a few eyebrows; it’s a piece of software that scans the social media site for emerging terms and stores them in a “social glossary.”

As reported by Business Insider UK, the patented system will discover new textual terms by searching for neologisms – a relatively new term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of becoming more commonly used, but hasn’t yet been widely adopted.

Once the system identifies new terms that are starting to become more popular, it will check they aren’t already in the dictionary before adding them to the social glossary. As is the case with new words and phrases, they can sometimes fall out of popularity. If this happens, the software will remove them.

Facebook says in the patent that the system will look out for “slang, terms of art, portmanteaus, syllabic abbreviations, abbreviations, acronyms, names, nicknames, re-purposed words or phrases, or any other type of coined word or phrase.”

Exactly what plans Facebook has in store for the system is unclear, but it’s been suggested that it could be used to improve its predictive text feature, which often doesn’t recognise slang words.

Facebook has used the example of ‘Rickrolled’ – the term given for a prank when someone is intentionally misdirected to a video of 80’s pop star Rick Astley’s hit ‘Never going to give you up' – as a term that would be added to the social glossary.

I’m not ‘throwing shade’ (I think that’s right) at Facebook, but maybe the company could have saved its patent and just copied the contents of the Urban Dictionary into its social glossary.

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Fed up with FB. They will end up being like MS, a disgusting company.
 
Just what the world needs, more gibberish words and sayings that are exclusively used on Facebook. I guess because I don't use that junk it will never really affect me directly, sadly it will result in people getting too comfortable using words that "Only Exist on FB" in their everyday lives resulting in confusion and a swift kick to the ***... If only the ladder was socially acceptable, whereas talking like a ******* is on the other hand.
 
I don't see what everyone is upset about...

They are creating a site that scans Facebook for new slang words and adds it to their version of an Urban Dictionary, without requiring the people to list the words and definitions. They aren't filing patents for the words, and by no means does it affect anyone who has no interest in it. I feel that there are more people finding reasons to hate this rather than not care about it.

I don't plan on using this, therefore it doesn't bother me. I could care less either way how it rolls out, good or bad. To me, it's just a search engine version of Urban Dictionary.
 
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