Huffington Post Acquire Adaptive Semantics

As reported last week on SemanticWeb.com, Adaptive Semantics has been bought out by key customer, The Huffington Post.  This news follows the acquisition of Collexis by Elsevier as reported last week and there does seem to be a trend for publishers buying into Semantic technology.

Adaptive Semantics provide an automated post moderation tool called JuLiA which can scan comments for potentially abusive or risky language (e.g. profanities) as well as profiling users:

“The Huffington Post originally deployed the linguistics algorithms built into the learn-by-example JuLiA system to help take the load off of human editors by automatically deleting the most abusive comments and automatically publishing those that met thresholds for being clean content. The idea was that gives them more time to focus on those comments worth having a legitimate argument about publishing or not.” [Read More]

As SemanticWeb.com report, the results are still not entirely reliable (e.g. it is possible to dupe the system by swapping asterisks for key letters in certain banned terms).  The time savings for human editors, however and resulting reduction in costs are clearly going to help larger publishers generate cost savings so we would expect this trend to develop further.

Share this Article: