Computational Linguistics « Outer Thoughts

Conjunctions in named entities

By arafalov, on March 26th, 2009%

A recent article on lingpipe discussed conjuncted named entities such as Johnson and Johnson and Wallace and Gromit. They suggest that maybe a way of treating this is as a frozen expression. I assume that means relying on statistical measures to see this Multi-Word-Expression repeating enough times to be treated as a unit.

In the United Nations . . . → Read More: Conjunctions in named entities

Visualizing CiteULike collections

By arafalov, on January 25th, 2009%

I am collecting my reading and reference material in CiteULike. I like the service because it can capture details from multiple sources. It also allows to discover what was collected by other interesting people through tags, people and bookmarks graph navigation.

Nice as CiteULike is, it is fairly difficult to get an overall picture of one’s own . . . → Read More: Visualizing CiteULike collections

New mailing list to discuss junction of NLP and Software Engineering

By arafalov, on January 17th, 2009%

Dr. René Witte has just created a new mailing list (SENLP) to discuss applying NLP techniques to Software Engineering and also to discuss general Software Engineering issues in developing NLP systems.

I am interested in both topics. I did 3 years as senior technical support at BEA and could see how applying NLP techniques on written notes . . . → Read More: New mailing list to discuss junction of NLP and Software Engineering

Where are all legal computational linguistics resources?

By arafalov, on January 13th, 2009%

I am frustrated. I know my corpus (resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly) shares a lot in common with biomedical and legal domain. And I can find interesting articles in biomedical domain dealing with similar issues of complex tokenization, long named entity mentions (though mine are much longer), etc. But I see nothing in legal . . . → Read More: Where are all legal computational linguistics resources?

Explaining Computational Linguistics to friends and family

By arafalov, on August 25th, 2008%

It is hard enough to explain what we are doing to our professors; explaining it in plain English to our friends and family is nearly impossible.

So it is always good to see people who can explain what POS tagger is and why it is important without having to throw around references to Norvig or Jurafsky.

Markus Dickinson . . . → Read More: Explaining Computational Linguistics to friends and family

Bulk converting doc files into txt (or html)

By arafalov, on April 19th, 2008%

I have written about converting Microsoft Word files into text or html using OpenOffice before. However, the wizards I described in that article were crashing when the number of files crossed into several hundreds.

I have written some macros to do the conversion, but they were scary looking and fragile. Fortunately, I now found a tool that . . . → Read More: Bulk converting doc files into txt (or html)

On uselessness of pretending to be somebody else

By arafalov, on January 24th, 2008%

While reading weka Data Mining book, I have come across this impressive example of using machine learning to confirm person’s authorship (p. 358).

In 19th century, there lived a famous rabbinic scholar Ben Ish Chai, who among other writings had two collections of letters. Ben Ish Chai claimed that only one collection was his and that the . . . → Read More: On uselessness of pretending to be somebody else

Parsing jumping jacks

By arafalov, on December 1st, 2007%

What could be common between Computational Linguistics and Aerobics? Quite a lot, as it turns out to be.

Dance descriptions, while not really in English do have a regular structure and can be thought of as a sub-language with full set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels.

There are basic words of the language (move names), correct ways . . . → Read More: Parsing jumping jacks

Upgrading to GATE 4? Beware of leftover configuration files.

By arafalov, on October 6th, 2007%

From time to time I experiment with GATE NLP toolkit. Just now I tried to upgrade to the latest version (version 4) and run into really strange problem with ANNIE system not loading correctly. Later, when I uninstalled older GATE version, it stopped loading at all.

The problem is the user configuration file gate.xml that is stored . . . → Read More: Upgrading to GATE 4? Beware of leftover configuration files.

Story of Human Language – great introductory audio course on linguistics

By arafalov, on September 29th, 2007%

As part of doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, I need to understand both computers and linguistics. I am fine with computers, but linguistics is not my strong point. Unfortunately, many of the linguistics books and resources are quite dry.

So, I was really happy to discover an audio course . . . → Read More: Story of Human Language – great introductory audio course on linguistics

Outer Thoughts