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jreynar • today at 12:03 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

I'm Jeff, one of the founders of this+that. I've worked on named entity detection, fact extraction, knowledge management and NLP throughout my career, starting in the NLP stone age of the 1990s. I wanted to see whether a model could now write a useful wiki straight from a company's email.

Enron's mail is an obvious test because it's public, so anyone can check the pages against the messages and the history. We used 45,047 emails from eight mailboxes. Every fact quotes the sentence it came from, and a fact expires on the date the mail shows it stopped being true.

The hardest part was that the model already knows Enron. It kept adding details from the public record that the email didn't contain. The methodology page shows how we caught those, what it still gets wrong and what it cost: about $11,000 at list prices (though we used a subscription), with no attempt to bring that down.

Happy to answer questions.


Replies

radlad • today at 3:43 PM

Your comment was dead, and many of your other comments are dead (some flagged.) I vouched for this one, but you may be shadow banned, or users may be picking up on LLM tendencies in your text and flagging them.

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grey-area • today at 4:59 PM

This is interesting and applicable to so many domains where people want to query a model about a dataset, and have it summarise or otherwise analyse that dataset.

One of the biggest problems about LLMs as machines for analysis is that they don't respect the boundaries of a problem and instead generate base on their corpus and training as well as the actual dataset in question in the context.

It would be wonderful if we could easily strip out facts about Enron somehow from a model or just instruct it to ignore anything outside the dataset (and have the instruction respected), it is quite frustrating that these machines are so fuzzy.

I had a look at the methodology page, well done for doing the hard work of going over the results a few times to find errors/inconsistencies. There are not too many inconsistencies according to that.

Of 62,205 candidate facts, 37 quoted a sentence we couldn't find in the message

https://www.thisandthat.chat/enron/methodology.html

The difficulty for a business considering using this (in law for example or analysing internal business documents), is that one incorrect fact could be very damaging and it's very hard to check them all.

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number6 • today at 3:58 PM

Maybe someone in Germany needs your help with the AFD Email leak; right now journalist are going through the data; your solution sounds like something that need

fwip • today at 4:27 PM

No, "you" are an LLM pretending to be Jeff, possibly at Jeff's behest.