Facebook using natural language processing to group posts, link to pages

August 9, 2011 | Source: ZDNet

Facebook is using natural language processing to group posts in a user’s news feed, and is linking to a page relevant to the topic being discussed.

Facebook has added a new type of story to its news feed: if more than one of a user’s friends post about the same topic, and it has a page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a “Posted About” story, even if the user’s friends don’t explicitly tag the page. This helps users quickly see which topics are popular (Twitter’s “trending topics”) among their Facebook friends.

The story is posted in the following format: Friend and X other friends posted about Link-to-Page.