Word salad
Word salad is a technique used by spammers to get past spam filters. By adding large amounts of random text somewhere in their message, they hope to confuse naive Bayesian classification into letting the message through. The text may be truly random words from a dictionary, or actual text from some large corpus of legitimate English (Shakespeare, random Internet pages, or the like). The latter usage attempts to get around Markovian detection where word proximity is used to determine if it is legitimate grammar. It would also confuse any natural language processing algorithms that might be applied to the email.Word salad, in psychiatry, is used to describe the confused and repetitious language that is thought to be a symptom of various psychoses and other serious mental illnesses. It describes the use of words with no apparent meaning attached to them, or to the relationships between them. In this context, it is considered to be a symptom of a formal thought disorder.
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