[rwill128]

I would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques.

For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.)

And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those.

Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.

[sharun]

You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :)

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link.

2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

[misiti3780]

i think one of the problems with this one-click card software is part of the the reason anki is effective is you make the cards yourself. it is just part of the processes. ive been using anki for the past six month to learn italian, and had great success but books like forever fluent show studies that say if you dont create the cards yourself, you will not see as much progress.

[nubbins]

I've tried stuff like this before and am certainly interested for language learning but there are drawbacks to becoming too efficient at entering flashcards. A huge amount of the benefit comes from seeking out and manually encoding the info into a flashcard. A big caveat on SRS systems that gets overlooked is they are very good at reinforcing knowledge but not great at teaching it to start with.