7.22.08

Rarefied Technologies Announces Public Beta of StupidFilter Language Processing Software

ALBUQUERQUE—July 22, 2008—Rarefied Technologies today announced the beta release of its highly-anticipated StupidFilter software. The StupidFilter aims to accurately identify deviation from standard written English, giving web application developers the tools they need to automate the moderation of community-driven sites in ways previously impossible.

Available now, this first public beta release of the StupidFilter supports classification—identification of text as either standard or substandard. Upcoming releases will be able to identify the precise degree of deviation from standard English using a technique called textual regression.

This latest beta release—available to the general public for the first time—features a complete rewrite of the classification engine using a support vector machine, resulting in dramatic performance gains (often thousands of times faster) over the initial proof-of-concept software. "The new engine is just ridiculously fast," said Rarefied Technologies founder and lead developer Gabriel Ortiz. "If you've only tried the live demo on our site, you haven't seen anything yet. The SVM blows the old technique out of the water."

The StupidFilter's ability to recognize substandard text is a direct result of the work done by hundreds of volunteers. "The community response to the StupidFilter project has been stunning," said Moderation Manager Paul Starr. "They've spent thousands of hours rating comments for potential stupidity, and we're really excited to be able to deliver a product to them."

StupidFilter creator Gabriel Ortiz founded Rarefied Technologies earlier this year to develop the StupidFilter and related projects. Rarefied quickly obtained venture capital financing from Flywheel Ventures, and follows a second-generation open-source business model, dual-licensing the software components that comprise the filter. The source code itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html), while the generated data models will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Press Contacts:

Rarefied Technologies Public Relations 505.903.6478 pr@rarefiedtech.com