Re: Paul Graham on fighting SPAM

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

Danny Siu <dsiu@adobe.com> writes:

> since we had much discussion on spams lately, it is worthwhile to
> see read about what lisp guru thinks the content based filters can
> effectively kill spams.

He has clearly seen the light :-)

There is a research field known as "information filtering" or
"(automatic) text classification" or "text categorization".  I don't
know the details of the theory, but folks in that community are
speaking of "naive Bayes classifiers" as one of the ways to do it --
maybe that's similar to his approach.  Other buzzwords that come to
my mind are kNN (k nearest neighbor) and support vector machines.
I'm not an expert in that field, but the numbers given by people who
talk about the effectiveness (quality) of text classifiers are quite
good, they are above 70% usually.  On much harder problems, that
is -- recognizing spam should be a no-brainer.

Maybe ShengHuo knows more and can elaborate.  I'm not an expert, just
aware that the field exists.

kai
-- 
A large number of young women don't trust men with beards.  (BFBS Radio)