My PhD research « Outer Thoughts

Making up with ANTLR

By arafalov, on May 28th, 2009%

I like ANTLR! It is a specialized tool that can really be applied to many difficult tasks when regular expressions get all Dust Puppy like. And I have used it in the past with great success.

But, every time I put this particular tool aside, I know that picking it back up will be like making up . . . → Read More: Making up with ANTLR

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

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?

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)

Artificial Intelligence discussion at BarCampNYC3

By arafalov, on March 16th, 2008%

They say at BarCamp that if you don’t like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not.

That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the . . . → Read More: Artificial Intelligence discussion at BarCampNYC3

Unravelling the black magic of bureaucracy

By arafalov, on September 1st, 2007%

Arthur C. Clarke once famously wrote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In the same vein, many people feel that any sufficiently established bureaucracy is like a black magic, sorcery even. Certainly, it often takes skills out of this world to follow the logic of modern tax return instructions.

Bureaucracy often has its place and . . . → Read More: Unravelling the black magic of bureaucracy

Outer Thoughts