No, but it's particularly apposite on this post, as SE is asking for a machine learning algorithm is to assist in moderating questions:
an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed.
which raises all sorts of questions as to what the reasons are for which questions [should][1] be closed - this is a grey area, and there is much argument on SE itself over what sort of questions are considered acceptable, to the extent that they have started retroactively disabling lots of content which doesn't fit with an arbitrary set of rules about what a Q&A site should have on it. Without some moderation obviously the site would descend into chaos, but with very heavy handed and arbitrary moderation it will atrophy and the very people creating the quality content they want will leave, leaving them with moderators (robot or not), new users and trolls, and not much else.
Personally I think it's a huge mistake for SE to start banning questions on the basis of them being not constructive. All their other categories of problem questions make sense, but trying to ban questions that are too controversial or involve opinions is IMHO unwise - that's exactly the sort of question which leads to engaging content on SO, even if some of it verges on a troll. This has been the problematic area for them and has lead to them marking lots of useful posts as not constructive even though they clearly are constructive and informative, just because they fall on the wrong side of a line decided retrospectively to declare certain questions unquestions, and others valuable.
It will be very interesting to see if any of their robot moderators are useful in delineating this more problematic area of questions which are controversial or involve opinions - potentially that is every question/answer set more complex than 'what is 2 + 2?', and that line can vary dramatically depending on the moderator, and their opinions.
So I think this raises an interesting (though perennial) question about how heavy handed community moderation should be; in some ways related to those questions raised recently about quality and moderation on HN.
I think a useful metric will be the time-to-first-answer and rate of submitted answers. These will be the answers to badly-researched questions á la "How do I get all the buttons on this page?[jQuery]".
Unfortunately, that is a post-question signal, and won't be able to be used in the context of the competition.
But seriously, Stack Exchange thrives because of its focus (which is maintained in large part by its culture of moderation, though only a small part of that is done by actual "moderators"; the community self-polices pretty well).
This contest is aimed at catching posts that would be closed before they're posted. Ideally we'll get a classifier that lets us give guidance to the askers. Better education of new/confused/troublesome users, leading to better posts, and fewer closed questions overall.
Yeah, I figured this would be used to possibly provide some Just In Time help. Can't say I'm surprised people read that as "people posting questions detected to be closed will be shot in the face and fed to the SE Inc pet Unicorn"
Good luck with that. Even your current human moderators can be extremely frustrating to deal with. Can't wait until they have the force of an algorithm behind them.
Replacing moderators with bots would be a terrible idea and hopefully will never happen. Kevin Montrose clarified it in a comment:
> To be clear, we’re not intending to have an algorithm automatically close posts. This is aimed at improving our quality metrics (which guide users before posting) and auto-flagging facilities (which help focus moderation attention).
"In a perfect world, we'd be able to offer specific, targetted guidance for authors whose posts were likely to be shot down, before they ever showed up on the site, and without requiring as much up-front effort from our community."
So you're wanting to use an automated system (which one might loosely term a bot) to prevent content from being displayed without having to have that content moderated by humans.
How is that not replacing moderators [in part] with "bots"?
an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed.
which raises all sorts of questions as to what the reasons are for which questions [should][1] be closed - this is a grey area, and there is much argument on SE itself over what sort of questions are considered acceptable, to the extent that they have started retroactively disabling lots of content which doesn't fit with an arbitrary set of rules about what a Q&A site should have on it. Without some moderation obviously the site would descend into chaos, but with very heavy handed and arbitrary moderation it will atrophy and the very people creating the quality content they want will leave, leaving them with moderators (robot or not), new users and trolls, and not much else.
Personally I think it's a huge mistake for SE to start banning questions on the basis of them being not constructive. All their other categories of problem questions make sense, but trying to ban questions that are too controversial or involve opinions is IMHO unwise - that's exactly the sort of question which leads to engaging content on SO, even if some of it verges on a troll. This has been the problematic area for them and has lead to them marking lots of useful posts as not constructive even though they clearly are constructive and informative, just because they fall on the wrong side of a line decided retrospectively to declare certain questions unquestions, and others valuable.
It will be very interesting to see if any of their robot moderators are useful in delineating this more problematic area of questions which are controversial or involve opinions - potentially that is every question/answer set more complex than 'what is 2 + 2?', and that line can vary dramatically depending on the moderator, and their opinions.
So I think this raises an interesting (though perennial) question about how heavy handed community moderation should be; in some ways related to those questions raised recently about quality and moderation on HN.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/faq#close