Introducing RPGExplorer

I have been tinkering with natural language processing for over six months on and off. My target was always the table top role playing community. The NLP stuff has not delivered the initial dividends I was hoping for. Half the effort was accumulating and polling feeds. That alone has issues. Trying to extract useful information is far harder.

As a byproduct of that work, I rolled out RPGExplorer. It currently contains a rolling 2-3 week window of feed articles linking back to the origin site along with my attempts at categorization/classification/tagging. I’m still poking at the NLP side plus tweaking the theme of the RPGE output.

I’m still uncertain where the end product lies. The current state was initially just a visualization tool for me to determine how well the NLP was doing. I’m going to tweak that side more thoroughly as time allows in between other projects I have in the pipeline.

Thus far, I don’t believe the NLP is up to the end goal of automated classification but the results are still useful for my purposes and perhaps other. The site also tweets every article it processes at @RPGExplorer. I was going to integrate a G+ page for the same purposes but that API is largely restricted and nearly impossible to use as a hobbyist. Facebook might be more accessible but I have little interest in opening that particular box of worms quite yet.