Happy New Year!

Slang is part of life

Down with linguistic purity!

If you surround yourself with people who overuse such language, kindly do yourself and all of us a favor and simply remove yourself from the particular linguistic environment. Why keep nagging? Language is inevitable and slang or various linguistic fads are part of life (and language). If it weren't for those, various mainstream NLP techniques would have a hard time programming in probabilities for single-word transitions (okay, that's a little NLP joke). Besides, most of the language listed in the link above is teenage-speak.

New Year's wish

[cartoon by Nick Galiafianakis for the Washington Post]

Read someone the riot act

Here's the gist of the Riot Act [enforced by the British government in 1715]:

"Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King."

In other words (aka the British way): 'you noisy louts, don't you know there are people here trying to sleep?'
OR (the un-cut and slightly un-kind and definitely non-British version):
tell someone(s) to "Shut the F*&#$% Up!"...

[Source: The Phrase Finder]

5 things

Getting to know me:

5 Things I was Doing 10 years Ago:

1. Moved across the Atlantic (round #1) to BigCity, VeryImportantState, USA, to start a PhD.
2. Broke up with Dutch bf.
3. Swimming in deep waters as I was trying something completely different academically.
4. Obtained a Fulbright scholarship.
5. Was online dating.


5 Things On My To-Do List Today:

1. Have a hot bath.
2. Keep reading that FunReading NonFiction book.
3. Work for 1hr on the proposal for the collaborative paper.
4. Do online apartment hunting (looking to let).
5. Do stretching exercises.


5 Snacks I Love:

1. Soups (even the instant ones)
2. Ramen noodles (bad habit leftover from my student yrs)
3. Anything crunchy (cucumbers, carrots, dried fruits and seeds)
4. Tea and cookies
5. Nuts


5 Things I Would Do If I Were A Millionaire:

1. Move to place near sea/beach, with plenty of sunlight and warm temperatures all year long.
2. Adopt a pet.
3. Fund a disabilities group.
4. Build my dream house.
5. Pay off my parents' debt.


5 Places I've Lived:

1. Several cities in various U.S. states.
2. City in Cameroon (Africa).
3. London, UK.
4. Athens, Greece.
5. Amsterdam, The Netherdlands.

5 Jobs I've Had:

1. Sales girl for Procter & Gamble.
2. Freelance programmer.
3. Reporter and Interpreter for a one-off private interview with a big-name Greek literature author in Athens (paid assignment).
4. Teacher.
5. Consulting Analyst and Computational Linguist for a global company.



5 blogs I'd like to tag:

Young Female Scientist
See Jane compute
Joel on software
TechCrunch
Language hat

RegEx's

Here's a very good point about using regex's for those who basically can't imagine using them! I love using regexes and am constantly amazed by how misunderstood they tend to be. Yes, regexes won't clean your kitchen, but they're darn good for some quick (though somewhat dirty) data mining tasks. Their power lies in the programmer's creativity.

Merry Xmas!

Merry Xmas!

SpinVox (again)

SpinVox's voicemail/speech-to-text service becomes increasingly important for my mobile communications. Today I noticed that although they had screwed up the names (a person name and a company name) on the message, they actually had just spelled them phonetically. The person who was calling was a stranger so I had no way to know the correct name. However, I took a few educated guesses about the possibly correct spellings based on the assumption that the resulting spelling was a phonetic representation of the input string. And I was right! Within seconds of googling, I found both the person's name and this person's affiliated company name.
A suggestion for SpinVox: Maybe run Soundex on your interface and pick the most frequently correct spelling for the names the engine recognizes. I think that would considerably improve performance.

Automated Information Extraction in Media Production

2nd International Workshop on Automated Information Extraction in Media Production (AIEMPro09)

Special Session at WIAMIS 2009

London, 6-8 May 2009

After the successful exordium at DEXA 2008, the second edition of AIEMPro will have the form of a special session at WIAMIS 2009 (The International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services)

Tentative deadlines:

Paper submission: 11 January 2009
Notification of reviews: 1 February 2009 Final camera ready (this is a STRICT DEADLINE): 13th February 2009

Areas of Interest (not limited to):

· Efficient and real-time audiovisual indexing in acquisition
· Automated repurposing of archived material on new media channels
· Automated news production
· Efficient indexing and retrieval of multimedia streams
· Automatic speech recognition and personality identification
· Collaborative systems for media production
· Information Retrieval systems from Multimedia Archives
· Automated material copyright infraction detection and material fingerprinting
· Content summarisation (e.g., sports highlights)
· Audiovisual genre and editorial format detection and characterisation
· Cross-media indexing and integration
· Content segmentation tools (e.g., shot and scene segmentation)
· Evaluation methods for multimedia analysis tools

Prospective authors must submit their work following the WIAMIS formatting instructions (http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/submissions.php) and send the paper in PDF format DIRECTLY to the organisers by e-mail.

Organisers:
Alberto Messina (RAI CRIT) a.messina@rai.it
Jean-Pierre Evain (European Broadcasting Union) evain@ebu.ch
Robbie De Sutter (VRT medialab) robbie.desutter@vrt.be

SpinVox

I signed up to try SpinVox's voicemail-to-text service on my mobile phone. They quickly set that up and I was impressed that it's a complimentary demo. Performance seemed to be lacking in proper name entity recognition whereas not so much in catching exotic accents. I had a Danish friend leave a voicemail for me with the details of our following day's meeting. SpinVox caught everything my Danish friend said but for her (Danish) name, my (Greek) name, and the name of the place (unfortunately for SpinVox we were meeting at a local Starbucks, so no excuses for not catching that! /wahaha.......... /hmm).
To SpinVox's credit, the call was placed in the middle of the street, a lot of noise in the background and the caller had an accent.
However, in actual conditions (if I really depended on that converted to text voicemail for my meeting) their performance was poor and the text I got useless as unfortunately the proper names SpinVox missed were critical information. For instance, I wouldn't know who was calling since they screwed up their name, and I wouldn't know where she wanted to meet because SpinVox didn't catch the place name. So in that respect, although an admirable effort, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Maybe users could build their own local dictionaries of names based on their -say- address books. They could upload to the SpinVox's server a dictionary of names pronounced with the particular user's accent to help augment SpinVox's central server's dictionary of names and accents. Still, a lot of real-time speech comes with a high unpredictability factor as various callers are expected to call the particular user. Only an adaptive speech recognition system could actually learn from ad hoc input in order to improve itself. Imagine for instance if every time I had a new caller, SpinVox could learn to memorize and subsequently recognize their accent and linguistic model; so, if your boss has an American accent and usually talks about project XYZ and meeting you at Room 234B in Building ABC, SpinVox could learn to expect this type of "talk" (and accent) when he next calls you. That would of course improve speech recognition accuracy and it would involve the successful marriage of a memory (lexicon/vocabulary + accents) with an adaptive learning algorithm.

Stargazer

Party time in the sky! It started on Nov 24th with a Venus, Jupiter and crescent Moon Conjunction and continues tonight Dec 13th with a Venus, Jupiter and Full Moon conjunction.
Astrologically speaking, this triple conjunction of the planet of Love and Money (Venus), of abundance and generosity of spirit (Jupiter) and the Moon (emotions, feelings, psychological make-up) is in general an auspicious aspect. However, it doesn't tell the entire story. The Dec 12th Full Moon in Gemini forms a rather threatening square with Mars in Sagittarius and together form a second square with the opposition of Saturn in Virgo and Uranus in Pisces. Two oppositions squaring each other form a "Grand Cross". Anger (Mars), accidents (Uranus), health (Gemini) and money (Saturn) generate issues boiling under pressure. Take care, everybody!

Riots in Greece

What's up with that?
People outside Greece wonder whether the horrendous ("accidental") police shooting of a teenager can really cause such fuss. If anyone knows Greeks and their (recent) history, one knows that Greeks just don't tolerate fools. At the same time, Greeks don't tolerate anarchy and, yes, a part of this has been taken advantage by the anarchists groups in Exarheia (Athens). But if you know Athens like I do, what's new!
The police shooting in Greece brings to mind a similar police shooting in London a few years ago. Again, an accident by the police. Again, no apologies given initially as the Brazilian guy was thought to be one of the terrorists the police was going after. But because he was not a UK citizen, the matter could not close as easily (or "accidentally") as it opened. There were protests and international intervention and inquiries. One must wonder how the UK government would have handled it if the police had accidentally killed a UK citizen...

CFP CoNLL-2009

The Thirteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-2009) will be held in Boulder, CO, USA on June 4 and 5, 2009.

And because I love good ol' Greek music...

Here's a treat...

And a personal attempt at translating the lyrics in English:

If you are a small cranky rock
in a desert
if you are a lonely cyclamen
on the top of a mountain
if you are a forgotten star
in the sky
how do you want me to know?

If you are night-time rain
falling in the ocean
if you are boat smoke
in the sea
if you are an old drawing
on a church wall
how do you want me to know?

If you are a thorn
in my heart
Me loving you so
How do you want me to know?

(Greek lyrics by Kostas Karidis, music by Spanos and singing by Karalis)