Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely | Hacker News Reader

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

labs.foxtype.com

73 pointsmikkiq52 comments

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I used this to check the text messages from Key and Peele's "Text Message Confusion" skit[1]:

Keegan: "I've been trying to reach out to you all day, are we on for tonight?" Polite (71 / 100)

Jordan: "Sorry dude, missed your texts. I assumed we'd meet at the bar. Whatever, I don't care." Polite (71 / 100)

Keegan: "Do you even want to hang out?" Impolite (30 / 100)

Jordan: "Like I said, whatever." Neutral (47 / 100)

Keegan: "Jesus, you are fucking priceless" Impolite (30 / 100)

Jordan: "You're the one who's fucking priceless!" Impolite (6 / 100)

Keegan: "You wanna go right now?" Impolite (31 / 100)

Jordan: "Ok let's go" Polite (76 / 100)[2]

Keegan: "You wanna really do this now?" Impolite (13 / 100)

Jordan: "Fuck yeah, let's do it" Impolite (19 / 100)

Jordan: "First round's mine" Neutral (43 / 100)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo

[2]: Adding a "." to the end of the "Ok let's go" drops it by three points to 73 / 100

That youtube video is hilarious..

>Please would you kindly help if good with you please, thank you kindly, thanks.

Took a while, but along with a coworker, we were able to get 100.

>You suck stupid shit. FUCK YOUUU??

Same here, but I was going for 0.

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.

Agreed, it's nicely put together. I think this could grow into a handy tool, like an advanced thesaurus of sorts.

Not sure if it was another word, but the word 'dudes' still has a suggestion to a word I'd firmly rank 'impolite' when I tried just now. That said it includes a whole bunch of swear words (marked impolite) - I could weirdly see using this to add a bit of flair to a put down.

I do find these things quite fun; I put in "You are a sexy beast" and got "You are a hot dog" as neutral, "You are a beautiful dog" as neutral but "You are a beautiful horse" would be pushing it and impolite; though "You are a glamorous horse" (or hot) is neutral.

Giving it a go with some Donald Trump twitter text, the suggestion was "President Obama was terrible on @60Minutes tonight" is impolite; a suggested change that would be more polite was "President obama was incredible on@60minutes last night.". I noticed with that it looped through the same words a few times - in some cases labelling the same phrase as both neutral and polite.

@Jaymzcampbell,

The suggested rewrite for "the dudes and dudettes were here" and gave it a 60/100 and a neutral response was

"The N(hint: for black) and fellas were here". All in all, this is a neat site for when I am angry and need to be polite with words.

I like the responses you got though. I can see myself using you are a glamorous horse:)

This actually seems pretty profound. Semantically, in some contexts, those words could be used interchangeably. It seems that the algorithm simply didn't understand the context where it would be socially acceptable to use such language, It's kinda like a small child!

>It seems that the algorithm simply didn't understand the context where it would be socially acceptable to use such language, It's kinda like a small child!

Thats correct. I further used the the suggested rewrites and it came back with some wild suggestions. It is hard to get $100%.

> @Jaymzcampbell,

Please don't repeat the username you're replying to. HN's threaded comments make that redundant.

Deleted comment

Ahh, guilty. Sorry about polluting your dataset! My first reaction to seeing this tool was "Ohh, I wonder what it thinks about cursewords". I can't imagine that is a rare thought.

I agree..

This isn't a criticism, per se, but I do find it interesting to try to "beat" the system.

Impolite:

"You are wonderful."

"I really love it."

"Your work has really inspired me."

"Why do I love what you're doing? Because of the following reasons."

Polite:

"Again, please show me your failure, which I love to see."

Ok. I'm out of time. :)

I would say this is sarcasm, which is a huge NLP problem by itself.

Fun game. Trying to say "you are wrong" in the most polite way possible. I still cannot get anything above 70.

"Thank you, but please realize that your response is zero percent correct, thanks."

94/100

Thank you, please understand your lovely response is zero percent correct, thanks.

95/100

Thanks, please understand your lovely response is zero percent correct :)

97/100

Hi! I thank you kindly for your lovely thoughts! Haha, please! They are very specious! Thanks! :-)

99/100

(Yours is my favorite so far, LOL.)

Hi, I would discuss the impressive contrast between these thoughts and the facts of reality with you, please; thanks! :)

100/100

I'm using this from now on

"Good afternoon, I'm very happy that you've sent a solution to our very good enigma we've published last week, our review team analyzed it and they would like you to stop contacting us with your miscellany of formulas, so thanks a lot for your interest but please understand we'll call the police if you backslide.:-)"

98/100

I deleted my last response which missed the "above 70" requirement and only tried to be "polite". I managed to get 85 with the following:

"I am sorry but the statement you have made is incorrect and I would like to offer a correction."

Thanks for your interesting comment! If you would, please allow me to follow your replies, if only to see your outragous commentary and enjoy the reactions of fellow readers. :-)

98/100

So it's basically rating formality as politeness?

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.

Apparently smileys make everything so much better :)

http://i.imgur.com/GxKOMuw.png

Edit: "We would like to express our sincerest thanks to all the best, most amazing cocksuckers that created this tone checker! :) " [96 /100]

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/ :)

I find that more and more of these sort of "Write more politely" things are propping up. Inherently they come off as either too distant or too unsure of oneself by throwing a bunch of non-assertive statements ("hedge statements") or speaking in a way nobody would actually speak. Combined with training sets always being incomplete and human nuance being something extremely difficult to teach, it always returns to "use your best judgement".

I feel like maybe I just "don't get it". At least I can have fun playing a game of "how rude can I be while still getting a polite score".

>I think your mother would have had a better life if she had swallowed you."

Polite: 77/100

It suggested I upgrade the curse in "Yo, fix the goddamn server already" to motherfucking (as it's only merely contentious.) I don't think it does what it promises! Fun idea, though.

And when you feed that output back as input, the top suggestion is: "Yo, fix the goddamn civil servants before"

S'up?

Polite Would you know if s'up?

Polite May I ask if s'up?

Polite May I know if s'up?

Polite I was wondering if s'up?

Polite Could you say if s'up?

Polite Could I know if s'up?

Polite I was thinking if s'up?

Polite Could I ask if s'up?

How to come across as a dickless pushover for dummies.

Seriously though I think it's bad to encourage people to pepper their comments with such trite. I would rather read a brief, sincere message than a longwinded weak one.

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!

Why does profanity produce "contentious" rather than "impolite"? (That doesn't make it universally inappropriate, but it's certainly less polite.)

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.

Closest we got was: "Hi, thanks for happy" -99/100

I found it:

"Hi, we thanks for the happy! Thank you for love! :-)"

100/100

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.

Suck my lady lumps, Thank you. 83% polite....hehe

Suck my dick, Thank you. Contentious....ha! The gender based norms are strong with this one.

Hilarious, after some iterations I got: Would you know if I might wonder if I may know what the heck you are looking at?

  > "You are not the greatest instrumentality in the scaffolds."
  > "He's a bit of a spare barrel."

Idiomatic expressions are also perturbed in a quite pleasant manner. :)

Is there a way to link to a specific query?

the suggestions for impolite needs fix?

If you enter vulgarities and offensive language, the suggestions seem to be just as bad.

""this is a fucking stupid task and idiotic in it's delivery.""

edit: it's a really cool tool, actually has helped me to make polite to uber polite.

Pretty cool but it would be helpful to have a way to add or submit entries (!)

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

Makes me think of the book 'Avogadro Corp'

"Bite me, please" 83/100

Disagreeing with the 'politeness' assessment of some of these words... type in 'Howdy' and the only "polite" words are "Welcome" and "Goodbye".

More troubling to me is that this feels more like one person trying to impose their definition of "polite" onto others, and many of the suggestions seem result in speech that is weak, weasel-y, or lacking a feeling of weight.

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