So in this lecture, we are going to discuss the topic of article spinning, this is meant to be a high
level lecture to describe what this problem is and why you might care.
Note that there are many possible approaches to this problem, and this section will discuss one.
So I hope that helps to distinguish this lecture from the next.
This lecture is meant to describe the problem, while the next lecture is meant to describe one possible
solution.
OK, so what is article spinning?
So imagine you've just decided to start your own blog.
It may be helpful if you've had experience with this in the past.
One fact that becomes painfully apparent to all bloggers once they've started blogging is that just
because you've written something does not mean other people will read it.
And of course, you didn't just start your blog to sit there and collect dust.
Perhaps your goal is to get lots of readers simply because it is satisfying to know that others have
read what you've written.
Perhaps your goal is to sell products on your blog.
Perhaps your goal is to make money from ads on your blog.
In all of these cases, the common theme is that you need people to actually visit your blog.
So how might that be done?
Well, in today's era, perhaps you might start by sharing your blog with your friends and family.
That's OK, but there are two problems with this approach.
Firstly is that it does not scale.
You want thousands of visitors and you surely do not have thousands of friends and family.
Secondly is that it's not targeted.
If your blog is about machine learning and data science, it is unlikely that your friends and family
really care, even if they may pretend to at first.
In fact, one of the major ways you're going to get people to your blog is via search and by search.
I mean, Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and so forth.
I assume that because you're on this website, you know what these are.
Now, again, just because you've created a website does not imply that it will get a good listing on
these search engines.
Search engines tend to rank web sites higher if they are more popular and more authoritative.
One way to accomplish this is to simply create lots of content by creating more content about different
topics.
You have a better chance of attracting more people.
So how do you create more content?
Well, the simple answer is you just have to write it yourself.
Now, take it from me.
Writing content is not easy.
It takes lots of time and effort.
But what if there was a way to write content automatically?
That is, to have a machine generate content for you?
So this is where article spinning enters the picture.
Perhaps you may have thought that you could simply copy and paste articles from other websites onto
your blog.
Note that this does not work, since search engines are smart enough to know that your site has simply
duplicated the content of another.
In fact, this will lead to your site.
Being penalized in your search rankings will get worse.
So this is not something you want to do.
One option that was popular in the early 2000s and 2010s was do spend the content that is take an existing
article and replace enough words so that it becomes sufficiently different from the original.
The trick is to replace words in such a manner that the result still makes sense.
Now, of course, you could just do this manually, but that still takes time and effort.
Ideally, the whole process would be automatic, and perhaps one way to accomplish that would be through
building a language model based on probabilistic patterns.
Now, to give you some sense of the real world application of this, I have seen actual software that
does this exact thing.
I personally haven't used it, but I've watched others use it long ago with decent success.
Note that this was before machine learning became popular, so the techniques being used weren't as
advanced as deep learning and neural networks.
Basically, what you would do is select a word you want to replace and the software would give you a
dropdown list of suggestions.
You could then click on one of those suggestions to replace the original word.
So it wasn't completely automated, but in some sense it at least augmented the capabilities of the
human.
Now, the reason why this still requires a human in the loop is because, as mentioned, machine learning
hadn't really taken off at this time in the people who did understand the state of the art in machine
learning.
We're in applying it to applications like these, so we will start by applying Markov models, which
have been around for about 100 years.
In other words, not so advanced.
However, remember that the goal of this isn't to build a modern article spinning product.
If I were to do that, I would charge you thousands of dollars.
The goal of this is to learn about Markov models, which is the current section of this course.
Many beginners mix this up, which is what I saw, often in V1.
And so it's important to go into this with the right mindset.
Furthermore, note that in more advanced sections and courses, we will learn about Transformers, which
will do a much better job at this task.
So if your goal is to simply get the state of the art in one line of code, that would be a much better
place to go.
One fact which I find quite amusing is that when version one of this course was released, Transformers
did not even exist, so we wouldn't even be having this discussion five years ago.
What was funny was a lot of beginners came to that chorus thinking you could actually build a human
level article spinner that would just magically write an article out of thin air.
Of course, I had to tell them that no such magic actually existed, at which point they got very angry.
Funny to me, but frustrating for them, I'm sure.
In any case, nowadays, there are many ways to improve upon Markov models, including Ardennes and
Transformers, but these are far beyond the technical level at this point in the course at this point.
Your goal should be exercising your understanding of market models.
Now, if you are interested in these more advanced techniques, don't despair since they are actually
based on what you learn here.
So in fact, these are a prerequisite to understanding these new advancements.
And as a final note on this topic, please be aware that article spinning is a Black Hat SEO technique.
Generally speaking, these techniques are not ethical and more practically.
They never work for very long.
If they do it all.
Thus, if your goal is to actually build a good and sustainable website that people enjoy, this is
likely not the way.
Furthermore, you also have to remember that Google invented Transformers.
So if you're going to try and use Transformers to fool Google, realize that they are way ahead of you,
there is simply no way you can trick them using their own technology, which by the time you see it,
is already old to them.
OK, so just remember you are in this course, not because you're trying to fool Google, because practically
you cannot.
You are in this course because you want to learn NLP.