Huffington Post Buys Traffic Cop

How does a website handle 100,000 comments posted every day? If you're Huffington Post, you buy a two-person tech startup behind the semantic analysis engine, Adaptive Semantics.

Arianna Huffington's site was already Adaptive’s major investor, having purchased a 20% stake last year. The co-founders, Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz, are now joining HuffPo and will manage community technology R&D and social news.

Despite the unique proposition of knocking on 3 million comments monthly, Huffington Post isn't the only site grappling with managing the quantity of comments posted on its site and the quality, with unruly behavior affecting the tone of its content and community.

Enter Adaptive Semantic’s JuLiA (Just a Linguistic Algorithm), which uses text-data analysis and linguistic algorithms to flag offensive language, identify repetitive behavior used to evade moderation, block spam, and recognize experts and top commenters. In May comments on Huff Post reached a record 2.8 million.

CEO Eric Hippeau commented: “Acquiring Adaptive Semantics helps us in what's become an 'arms race' between algorithms and commenters looking to circumvent the more common tech-based comment solutions. Adaptive Semantics…will also pay dividends beyond efficient comment moderation, as the site continues to develop ways in which tech can be leveraged to engage our community.”

JuLiA’s “supervised machine learning,” increases in efficiency as more information is tagged and applied. The system can identify hate speech and abusive language and be applied to social graphing and article recommendations.

Adaptive’s technology is used by CNN, Newsweek, and Disqus – but not for long. “We will honor the contracts, but very likely will not renew them,” said Hippeau, noting that the site doesn’t want to be in the licensing technology business.

Huffington herself commented: “From the beginning, moderating comments has played a pivotal role in helping Huff Post to rapidly expand by ensuring a civil dialogue that nurtured a loyal and passionate community.”

One more step forward for what began as Huffington's citizen soapbox, and is now arguably the little engine that could become the Web's leading newspaper.