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by jakear 2570 days ago
Looks like it does subject/verb plurality agreement based on the presence of an 's' at the end of the subject. Thus: "Asbestos prevent cancer". Heh. Software.
3 comments

I looked at the site again to see that it actually says "asbestos cause cancer", because I was really curious how it could ever prevent cancer...

No mention of Cheetos or Doritos though.

“Asbestos” is a plural, though (in Greek and in Latin—where the word originates—by declension.) The fact that English bungled the receive doesn’t mean that the algorithm is wrong. I would expect a sufficiently-intelligent pluralizing algorithm (something like GPT trained on individual grapheme sequences) would pluralize asbestos too (in absence of direct evidence of its pluralization; and maybe even then.)
Huh, I think you meant to say "Asbestos cause cancer". It'd be really interesting if some news articles claimed asbestos prevents cancer.