
Show HN: FoxType – Using NLP to help you write more politely - mikkiq
https://labs.foxtype.com
======
chavesn
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](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

~~~
pavornyoh
That youtube video is hilarious..

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cmccart
>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.

~~~
imh
>You suck stupid shit. FUCK YOUUU??

Same here, but I was going for 0.

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pavornyoh
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.

~~~
jaymzcampbell
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.

~~~
pavornyoh
@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:)

~~~
tekromancr
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!

~~~
pavornyoh
>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%.

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JacobJans
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. :)

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

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

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

94/100

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

95/100

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

97/100

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adhsu01
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.

~~~
plusepsilon
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.

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chei0aiV
Apparently smileys make everything so much better :)

[http://i.imgur.com/GxKOMuw.png](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]

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SixSigma
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.

~~~
drglitch
Great product and lots of fun to play with! The odd edgecases remind me a
little of [http://translationparty.com/](http://translationparty.com/) :)

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Nadya
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

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1123581321
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.

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

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musesum
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?

~~~
SignMeTheHELLUp
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.

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jval
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!

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

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kiddico
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.

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

~~~
anthony_romeo
I found it:

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

100/100

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sswaner
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.

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beilabs
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.

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pablovidal85
Hilarious, after some iterations I got: Would you know if I might wonder if I
may know what the heck you are looking at?

~~~
rzzzt

      > "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. :)

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gnu8
Is there a way to link to a specific query?

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reviseddamage
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.

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

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angersock
For added good fun, seed it with some Torvalds: [https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-
watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-ra...](https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-
watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-rants.aspx)

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bshep
Makes me think of the book 'Avogadro Corp'

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thelonecabbage
"Bite me, please" 83/100

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tomc1985
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.

