The Case of the Blah Blah Blahs

A famous datset of Reuters articles from the 1980s includes “Blah blah blah.” in place of some stories. Why?

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Show notes:

• 00:31 - The link Jess sent
• 8:31 - SGML
• 8:46 - This is what the blahs look like and this is what all the entries look like.
• 24:00 - FTP
• 24:34 - Linguistic Data Consortium
• 29:00 - RCV1 at NIST and David D. Lewis’s README
• 30:22 - Construe-TIS: A System for Content-Based Indexing of a Database of News Stories (Phil Hayes and Steven Weinstein)