Automatically exported from code.google.com/p/soylent
As a step toward integrating human expertise permanently into our writing tools, we present Soylent, a word processing interface that integrates crowd contributions to aid users in complex writing tasks ranging from error prevention and shortening paragraphs to automation of tasks like citation searches and tense changes. We believe that crowd workers with a basic knowledge of written English can support both novice and expert writers. These workers can perform tasks that the writer might not, such as scrupulously searching a document to save space or updating a list of addresses to include a zip code. They can also provide a valuable outside perspective on a document, pointing out errors that the word processor cannot catch and then suggesting fixes.
Soylent aids the writing process by integrating paid crowd workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform into Microsoft Word, a popular word processing interface. Soy-lent is people: its core algorithms involve calls to Mechani-cal Turk workers (Turkers). Soylent is comprised of three main components: 1) Shortn, a text shortening service that cuts selected text down to 80% of its original length on average without changing the meaning of the text or introducing errors. 2) Crowdproof, an augmentation of Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker that finds problems that Word cannot, explains the problem and suggests fixes. 3) The Human Macro, an interface for offloading and automating arbitrary word processing tasks such as formatting citations or finding appropriate figures.