Facebook recently received a patent that is getting a little attention. It is a piece of software that scans the social media site for emerging terms and stores them in a “social glossary.” TECHSPOT brought this interesting information to us in their article, “Facebook patents new software that creates a slang dictionary.”
Urban Dictionary step aside. The patented system will discover new textual terms by searching for neologisms – a relatively new term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of becoming more commonly used, but hasn’t yet been widely adopted.
It is still unclear what Facebook plans to use the system for, but there are possibilities. It could be used to improve its predictive text feature, which struggles with recognizing slang words. Only time will tell for sure.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
