Fames are an environmental hazard of cyberspace. They sneak up on you, drop into your mailbox, and wham! burst across your screen in an irritating profusion of venom and bile. Flames are verbal attacks spread by computer-mediated communications, and they're all over the Net. That's what drove Ellen Spertus to write Smokey, an AI-based system that automatically detects flames before they explode in your face.
Spertus created Smokey last summer while working at Microsoft Research. The system, which uses an experimental natural-language parser, a decision tree, and a bunch of Lisp code, can actually separate flames from ordinary email messages. This makes it easy to file them away for reading later or never at all.
To develop the program, Spertus worked with webmasters from three controversial Internet sites Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, NewtWatch, and The Right Side of the Web. With more than their fair share of hate mail, these sites were only too happy to provide her with copies of messages they'd received.
Right off the bat, Spertus realized that one site's flame is another site's fan mail. To solve this problem, she developed a set of linguistic rules for detecting flames and a set of site-specific plug-ins for villains and heroes. Thus, an email to NewtWatch bemoaning Slick Willy (President Clinton) is quickly identified as a flame, whereas the same note sent to The Right Side of the Web scores high marks for accuracy.
Spertus also learned that even though flamers target different enemies, they often share a common grammar. They tend to use noun phrases as appositions for example, "you bozos," "you flamers," and "you people." Likewise, these irate mailers often use the word get followed (within 10 characters) by the words life, lost, real, clue, with it, or used to it. Fifty of these such rules, fired in rapid succession, allow Smokey to distinguish good from bad mail.
Spertus believes Smokey demonstrates that automated, intelligent email filtering is possible. She also thinks other applications could benefit from her research. "When mail comes into a company, a program like Smokey could direct it to the right department," she predicts. "That way, big companies such as IBM wouldn't have to hire dozens or even hundreds of people to read incoming messages from some email@example.com address."
After recently handing the project over to Microsoft, Spertus plans to finish her PhD at the University of Washington and MIT. Now it's up to Chairman Bill to decide Smokey's fate.