This reveals a minor and probably obvious weakness of
pseudonyms--writing
styles.
We probably need "rephrasing remailers" which do some rudimentary grammar parsing on input text, and randomly substitute equivalent constructs such as switching active/passive voice, synonyms, changing the word order where it is insignificant, joining/splitting sentences, etc. Anyone here have any experience in NLP (natural language processing), specifically parsing english?
...
Another starting point is language translation software. After your text has been translated automatically to spanish -> french -> german -> english, not much of the orignal style will remain. Hopefully, enough meaning will be preserved to allow understanding.
This whole problem looks to me to be AI-complete. I mean, I can't understand the manual from my Roland synth without a whole lot of head-scratching, and that was translated by a human! I don't think you're going to see a computer program giving intelligible rephrasing any time soon. The burden of disguising writing style may continue to fall on the author, but if everyone has the tools to statistically analyze their own messages before they send them, they'll at least see what they need to change around before sending. [I, for example, might decide to use sentences with fewer than three clauses...] Joe
participants (1)
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jthomas@mango.mitre.org