Ramifications of a linguist's life

iPhone for hearing loss?

2009-07-09T10:22:00.022-04:00

Apparently, now you can cure your hearing loss with a $9.99 gadget that works to turn your iPhone into a hearing aid according to this CNET article. Huh? Why is everyone with an acquired hearing loss then spending thousands of dollars to get state-of-the-art hearing aids? The article is ludicrous. Obviously what we have all missed was that a combo of a simple volume amplifier and an equalizer is enough to restore one's hearing to optimal levels. Ginger Labs claim that "For those with a hearing loss, soundAMP reawakens your sense of hearing; sounds comes to life and you hear better again." For some reason this excerpt reminds me of these bogus $5 "hearing aids" ads you see in the back pages of pop U.S. magazines.

SoundAMP offers a feature that repeats the last seconds of the recorded sound. For a person with acquired

hearing loss, this is actually a useless feature! Let me first note that repeating "recorded sounds" is not the same

as repeating speech/conversation (which is what the article says this feature does). "Pure tone" sounds are usually

no problem for people who use hearing aids; all you need to "perceive" these sounds is an amplifier and any

hearing aid can fit that bill. Speech is much more complex and presents a problem of a taller order. Deciphering

speech involves -beyond capacity for perceiving plain sensory input- recognition, processing and understanding,

all very different cognitive processes in the brain.

The article states: "According to the developers, SoundAMP improves your hearing quality in a variety of

environments, including lecture halls and noisy restaurants. Thus, it has the potential to help students as well as the

hearing-impaired." This quote is just as vague as they come!! How exactly are students and "the hearing impaired"

similar audiences? It just shows the author's blatant ignorance of the mechanics and complexities of hearing loss

and related hearing aid technology. For sure, if hearing loss could improve in as simple a manner as turning up the volume

in an iPhone, none of us would be spending so much money in buying *actual* hearing aids, nor would the government

bother with research into hearing loss, and related brain, speech and signal processing tech. Let's set the record

straight: simply amplifying the volume may help about 5-15% of people with acquired hearing loss. The same

people can actually perform a simple surgery which restores their (conductive) hearing loss into "normal" levels.

The majority of people with acquired hearing loss need much more than a $5 amplifier with equalizing and recording

options.

They need a state-of-the-art speech processor. Of course such a feature could potentially improve its usefulness

if it could repeat sounds after a (slight) frequency mapping procedure, where a shift is made around areas where

people have reduced sensitivity for certain frequencies. However, that's exactly what hearing aids are (supposed

to be) doing! At least in theory, they are programmed to tweak your auditory input to match your audiogram's levels.

However, both the audiogram and the 'tweaking' process have severe limitations. For instance, audiograms are not

exact science! And hearing aids, depending on their underlying digital or analog platform, may not allow you any type

or level of 'tweaking'. And of course even if you had the perfect hearing aid to match your individualized (perfectly

measured) audiogram, there is always the X-factor of how your brain works with all this. Some people are unable to

benefit by state-of-the-art hearing aids despite their best efforts.

Maybe an improvement could be seen in replaying the recorded sound after applying a noise filter for specific problem

frequencies, e.g. a white noise filter, or every freq > 5000 Hz? I would never trust a machine to provide any noise filters

for me, beyond when applied in the extremes of the sound band. Speech is so much more complex than that.

Current state-of-the-art hearing aids offer a number of programmable channels. Users can try and test any one of

those channels that functions as an automatic noise filter; such a channel adjusts environmental sounds and speech input

to the user's audiogram and decides which frequencies to filter out based on indications in your audiogram. For many

of the reasons I mentioned above, this is utterly useless! Real speech and real brains are multifaceted dynamic systems;

no tech has come to address that level of complexity yet.

In an older post of mine posted in this blog last summer, I complained how the new iPhone was not hearing aid

compatible like most popular cell phones are. iPhone doesn't come with a hearing aid compatibility standard, so

you have no way to tell how well it fares with the microphone and telecoil of a modern hearing aid.

Incidentally, if you're curious about the hearing-aid compatibility standards for various popular hearing aids, go

to Phonescoop Phone Finder and choose a weighted search showing all options, where you can search for phones with high hearing aid compatibility. Anything about M3/T3 is what most people with acquired hearing loss need (M4/T4 is the top score and most phone may not accommodate the same rates for both M(icrophone) and T(elecoil)). The telecoil switch is what offers elimination of background noise in modern hearing aids and it's very useful for speaking on the phone while in the middle of the street or some other public area. When you have your telecoil switch on, though, you lose the volume of the microphone so you usually need pretty good phone compatibility with both your hearing aid's microphone and telecoil. Without a hearing aid compatibility (HAC) standard, you cannot tell if your new phone will work with your hearing aid without interference. In terms of usability, inference is critical since it renders hearing aids useless and the phones by extension become anything but a nuisance to people with acquired hearing loss. For the hearing impaired, speech perception is near impossible with the aid picking up buzzing, humming of whining noise when the user is on the phone.

Although it's nice to see anything like an improvement of sound clarity on iPhone, this is still nowhere near what customers with acquired hearing loss need to see in order to use an iPhone for listening purposes (not just music but also for speech).

IJCNN2009: June 2009 Atlanta, GA

2009-06-01T05:59:00.008-04:00

An interesting joint conference focusing on the application of neural networks and other computational intelligence methods in time series forecasting.

With an exceptionally rich program of Special Sessions, Tutorials, Plenary Talks, Panels, Workshops and Invited Speakers, it promises to be a huge 5-day neuro-fest.

My favorite IJCNN2009 activity: the "neurophysiology lab tour" at Emory University.

Porting old C++ code into Eclipse

2009-05-24T13:36:00.012-04:00

What I've been up to: I recently resurrected my old C++ code (developed in MS Visual Studio).

Since I no longer have that VC++ version on this machine, I quickly downloaded (for free) and installed the Express 2008 version.

The result was impressive in that my (6.yr.) old code now actually runs on Express (only "fix" were a few dll patches).

The idea of porting it to Eclipse was motivated by an old wish to re-write (and expand) this code using open source tools that run in various platforms (if not in Java).

We'll see how that goes. ;-)

Bloggy has a new Wordpress blog

2009-04-13T10:40:00.002-04:00

Check it out and let me know what you think.

The content won't be identical but how it will differentiate is a mystery at the moment.

Eventually I suspect some clear differentiation will take place. Until then, watch out your favorite interface and let me know if you have a preference!

Experienceon.com

2009-02-02T14:39:00.002-05:00

ExperienceOn is Spanish start-up based in Barcelona, that is trying to top Google on the search front by offering what they call intelligent services. Is ExperienceOn just one more start-up that tries to replicate Google? I guess time will tell.

Make your browser your handy research and note-taking tool

2009-01-31T17:35:00.005-05:00

I love zotero. It's a free online note-taking tool that right now works with the Mozilla Firefox browser. If you are a student or a researcher and do a lot of online work (who doesn't these days), give it a try. It keeps your online findings organized and in one place. It really makes your searches truly productive and ready to use. Here's a good summary of the Zotero functionality from the Zotero site:

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

I would really like to see a Chrome extension of Zotero! Here's hoping!

Chrome

2009-01-31T17:08:00.005-05:00

Since Google announced its brand new browser last year, I stopped using Mozilla and turned exclusively to Chrome. I did have to get back to Mozilla to load some pages full of add-on's that Chrome does not yet support. And I even noticed a slight deterioration in the quality of the Chrome browser in the case of a few pages that I use daily.
Did Google abandoned Chrome? How hard is it to get it up-to-date with add-on's?
It's OK (and understandable) to want to market new products fast but let's not forget quality! Someone needs to finish off the work they started with launching Chrome.

Global Google search glitch today

2009-01-31T17:00:00.005-05:00

What happened, you guys?
I quickly fixed the problem when I saw the screwed up http address field but, boy, was it scary to know that Google could ever get screwed up even for a few minutes!
I would really never expect Google to allow any human error as they call it to show.
Let's hope this will never happen again.
In a few of the boards I frequent, people who are clueless of basic web editing, linking processes and the potential of human error in every step along the road started talking about using anti-virus programs or different browsers or even different search engines (!).
I believe that glitch could have hurt Google just because most people are not tech savvy enough to realize how "superficial" an error that was and truly just an "accident". For most users, Google is (or has been until today) beyond human error.

Google and NLU

2009-01-25T07:34:00.006-05:00

Page has said the following:

The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

Thank God he also admits that we're not there yet (although Google no doubt works hard toward this goal).
Natural language understanding (NLU) is so much more than a word for word "decoding" of the linguistic meaning. Understanding "exactly what [one] mean[s]" requires full-blown NLU (rather than simply NLP) techniques and approaches. Linguistic and pragmatic context for instance figure big in NLU. And so are some "usability" aspects of the query for instance the intentions of the querent, assumptions and underlying inferences.
The search engines of the future will allow for a query to actually organize matching knowledge they mine from the internet instead of simply match against some web text. So when you plug in a query like "what is the cost of buying a house in Costa Rica in 2009?", you will expect something more specific and on-point than a list of "relevant" documents.

Google v. Powerset v. Live Search

2009-01-16T07:39:00.008-05:00

Unfortunately, Microsoft's Live Search engine did not do much better than Powerset for the same search string:

LiveSearch results

PS: Click on the link to enlarge the snapshot.

Google v. Powerset search (part III)

2009-01-16T07:05:00.018-05:00

Here's a comparison of the two search engines on the search string "flight 1549".
Notice that there is a Wikipedia article about this term. FYI flight 1549 of USAir crashed yesterday over Hudson River luckily with no victims.
Since Powerset only works with wikipedia articles, I thought the term was a good testbed.

The results are pretty disappointing for Powerset. Google yielded the relevant news articles about the flight on the top of its first page. Powerset didn't yield any relevant article in the first page (or as far down as the 5th page; I wouldn't look anywhere deeper than that!):

Powerset results

Ironically, Google listed the "flight 1549" wikipedia article first in its search results effectively beating powerset in its own turf:

Google results

Powerset (part II)

2009-01-08T15:13:00.009-05:00

So, Microsoft acquired Powerset.
Microsoft always strived to catch up with and eventually challenge Google's search prowess. The acquisition of Powerset is part of this plan.
Powerset have been working off their San Fransisco HQs on a different type of search engine. One that is promised to be "natural language driven".
Here's an example of what the Powerset search can do (according to Powerset):
Instead of searching for book children (ala Google), imagine being able to search for: book for children, book by children, and book about children.
According to Powerset, "there would not be any way for us to properly express the query "books by children" without using the natural language". In other words, a natural language driven search would facilitate the natural tendency of users to phrase their queries using natural language rather than a string of words. So at least from a usability point of view, Powerset search seems pretty well-justified.
But does it work as promised?
I ran a few searches along the lines of books by children on the Powerset search engine and I got results which are at best as mixed as those from Google.
Watch this space for an analysis.

Powerset now part of Microsoft

2009-01-03T06:51:00.002-05:00

I think that's big news on many levels. More on this later...

Speaking of Machine Translation...

2009-01-02T17:37:00.004-05:00

Have you noticed how no online MT tool (I tried online Systran, Google and Babelfish) is capable of translating transliterated Greek into English?
Given how popular transliteration is for languages with their own "exotic" alphabets, I believe this is an avenue worthy of further exploration.

Machine Translation or CAT?

2009-01-02T17:06:00.008-05:00

Asking whether machine translation (MT) or computer-aided translation (CAT) works better is pretty much a version of the chicken or the egg question in the translation circles.

In Machine Translation, (usually rule-based) software translates text from one language to another, and the human translator acts as an editor who corrects and/or customizes the process to meet specific project/data/customer requirements.

CAT tools work like a dictionary or taxonomy of sorts that save human-generated translations and keep them easily accessible, organized and consistent.
CAT-Translated text segments are stored in special files called Translation Memories (TM), which are then used as a basis for new translations.

The former relies on NLP and corpus linguistics algorithms and heuristics for the translation of text from one language to another. The latter relies on human translation and capitalizes on storage and editing post-processes.

Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.
In fact I believe that an "ideal" solution would involve a successful merge of both methodologies. MT methods seem to scale better and CAT methods seem to fare better in terms of precision.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T13:07:00.012-05:00

Slang is part of life

2008-12-31T05:05:00.004-05:00

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

2008-12-31T04:52:00.003-05:00

[cartoon by Nick Galiafianakis for the Washington Post]

Read someone the riot act

2008-12-30T17:56:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-28T14:45:00.009-05:00

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

2008-12-28T04:49:00.003-05:00

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!

2008-12-25T16:50:00.002-05:00

Merry Xmas!

SpinVox (again)

2008-12-22T09:48:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-17T19:14:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-17T05:45:00.007-05:00

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

2008-12-13T05:10:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-12T05:10:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-07T07:51:00.003-05:00

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...

2008-12-06T10:57:00.004-05:00

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)

Temple Bar

2008-11-18T12:51:00.011-05:00

Temple Bar is the reason people from all over the world visit Dublin.
Besides the innumerable pubs, bars and clubs, Temple Bar is simply gorgeous. Check my pictures and you will see what I mean :).

Here's a typical corner in the Old Town (aka Temple Bar). Watch the gorgeous wall colors:

In this picture you can actually see the canal at the far end of the cobblestone street:

I just love it how almost all Temple Bar streets end at the face of beautiful old buildings:

Saint Patrick's Cathedral

2008-11-07T08:51:00.003-05:00

Although I posted pictures of the buildings in the vicinity of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, I realized I didn't post a photo of the Cathedral itself. I promise to post a good one soon. /blush

and one more...

2008-11-06T16:51:00.000-05:00

One of the Christchurch Square buildings:

Christ Church Cathedral

2008-11-06T16:48:00.006-05:00

I find this architecture food for the eye :):

The Christchurch Cathedral (dating back to the eleventh century):

Dublin Ireland

2008-11-05T14:57:00.016-05:00

/hihi Last month I mentioned that I moved to Dublin. /shock
I wanted to show you some pictures so here goes.
This picture shows both the Christ Church (or "Christchurch" as I see written here) Cathedral and the surrounding buildings (and traffic) of the square:

No clue what this guy is doing in my photo. He was just passing by when I pressed the button /hmm.

The gorgeous old building below is close to Saint Patrick's, a couple of blocks down the road from the Christchurch Cathedral shown above.

Here's another gorgeous building at the corner of Patrick Street and Bull Alley Street in the vicinity of St. Patrick's Cathedral:

Check out the lamp post in the above! /omg I think it's very pretty!

More to follow soon! :)

John Grisham

2008-11-05T14:41:00.008-05:00

The man knows how to write! His legal-world thrillers -categorized under Crime in the popular Irish Hodges Figgis bookstore in Dawson St- are not the only genre he can work on apparently! I recently had the pleasure to finish 'Playing for Pizza'

and I was very pleased. It made me laugh out loud (I mean really /wahaha) and a la typical Grisham way, I didn't want to leave it aside until it was done and over with! My current Grisham adventure includes 'Skipping Christmas' and so far, I'm sold. :D

Political landslide

2008-11-05T14:29:00.013-05:00

Fancy that! /blur
Democratic Obama wrote history today.
I care not for the color of his skin but for the fresh air he brings in with him. Something went terribly wrong in the last 8yrs. Time to build things anew. Onward!

From Silicon Valley to Dublin Ireland...

2008-10-25T04:37:00.003-04:00

Crossing over the Atlantic for one more time.
It's really beautiful here. Looks to me even more gorgeous than London where I lived for 4yrs. There is a slight betterment in people too: a bit more open to strangers, a bit more joyful and humorous and lighthearted.
Here's to new beginnings!

New Google Broswer: Chrome

2008-09-04T04:35:00.006-04:00

Released on beta on Sept 2, 2008.
Absolutely fantastic by a quick look at things.
It's not only the detachable tabs, now you can make your gmail and google calendar shortcuts on your desktop! I bet we all are going to use them more often now.
Curious about what could crash it if anything; it seems pretty robust! Well done, Google!

Word Vine (game)

2008-07-26T16:19:00.003-04:00

Word Vine

Place word on the vine and link every word to finish the level!

Play this free game now!!

If you wonder how ontologies are built, try this game! Very educational.

What's your favorite language?

2008-07-23T02:02:00.003-04:00

Huh? Seriously?
You mean, programming languages are not just tools?
I say, show me the project and I'll tell you which language I prefer for it.
You won't call in a French interpreter to translate an English-Corean dialog, will you. In a similar fashion, specific programming tasks almost require specific type of programming tools. The right language for the job may not be your favorite but then this only means that this programming job is not your favorite thing to do either. Also a French interpreter could possibly re-train and learn to do Korean interpretations. He will still be using a language to do his job and the basic methodology will remain the same; only the language "rules" will have changed. Similarly, regardless of what your current programming expertise is, what counts is that you are familiar with and eventually applying the same intrinsic methologies and principles of programming. So, what's really a "favorite language"?

Text Analytics Java development (job post)

2008-07-22T14:59:00.005-04:00

Text Analytics Developer - Java - Computational Linguistics
in US-IL-Chicago

Company: CyberCoders Engineering
Location: Chicago, IL

What you need to apply:

# A strong background in Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing.
# Proven ability to deliver text mining or information retrieval solutions for real world applications
# Demonstrates and applies thorough understanding of software development methodology and protocols.
# Excellent programming skills in Java
# Expert-level understanding of machine learning and statistical techniques as applied to text analytics, e.g., information extraction, summarization, classification, clustering, tone/sentiment analysis, relevance ranking
# Experience in the creation and exploitation of domain and task ontologies in text analytics are a plus
# A background check will be required; holding an active security clearance is a plus.

What you will be doing:

# Developing and implementing commercial software applications.
# Identifying and modifying existing algorithms, code implementation, testing, and maintenance.
# Development will be done in the Java programming language and will integrate with the D2K analytics development environment unless specified otherwise.
# Work within the Analytics Group in planning and executing the creation and delivery of text analytic features.

What's in it for you:

# An attractive compensation plan including cash, stock and bonus is available to the right candidate.

Required Skills
Text Analytics Developer, Java, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Text Analytics, Information Extraction, Summarization, Classification, Clustering, Tone Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Relevance Ranking, D2K

Relevant background includes:
Text Analytics Developer, Java, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Text Analytics, Information Extraction, Summarization, Classification, Clustering, Tone Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Relevance Ranking, D2K

The following job types are relevant:
Information Technology, Engineering, Professional Services

How to apply:
Through the company's website.
Recruiter's Name: Reggie Landicho
Job ID: RL-TextAnalyticsDev-IL6

Diigo

2008-07-18T01:45:00.002-04:00

A new way to keep track of information you find on the web and share it with friends. Also a new way to connect with people all over the world who share your bookmarks and therefore interests. Visit Diigo and start marking up and sharing the web with your like-minded buddies. Learn more about the Nevada-based start-up at: About Diigo.

start-up effort in sentiment detection and analysis

2008-07-16T02:01:00.004-04:00

"Semantic analysis" or "semantic measurement" or "sentiment detection" are very popular with startup's. Take for instance ScoutLabs and SkyGrid. The former capitalizes on the early warning detection of security-related events in news and the latter is watching negative and positive sentiment in news about business in order to inform stock market trends. In both occasions, the sentiment analysis technology relies heavily on automatically analyzing natural language input in unstructured form and filling records of a database with the extracted/tagged information. One has to wonder about the limitations of database systems for successfully undertaking such task.

4th Annual Text Analytics Summit in Boston (June 16-17 2008)

2008-06-12T16:47:00.007-04:00

An extremely interesting 2-day menu of Text Analytics activities in Boston coming up this Sunday. It includes (the highlights below are my selection from the online menu):

1. Pre-conference workshops (Text Analytics for dummies and MarketPlace Overview),

2. Keynote by Microsoft CompLing Research Labs on sentiment detection,

3. An Industry Panel including a Sr. Product Manager from Business_Objects/SAP (previously Inxight), the CTOs of Attensity and Clarabridge and the VP of SPSS,

4. Text mining and evaluation in blogs,

5. A presentation in Speech Analytics by the SVP of CallMiner, Inc. and

6. A presentation in Visual Analytics in Pharma data by the rep of Merck KGaA.

Euro 2008

2008-06-10T17:30:00.003-04:00

The Greeks didn't get a head start today as they lost the game against Sweden. We're all awaiting Saturday now when they fight against the Russians!

Glottopedia

2008-06-10T13:03:00.003-04:00

Check out Computational Linguistics in Glottopedia*. Of course you can edit the lemmas just like in Wikipedia. A nice little corner for CompLinguists.

*Apologies if the link to the Glottopedia site doesn't work; I've found that the site is down periodically.

iPhone

2008-06-09T17:02:00.006-04:00

Well, okay, it's now a bit cheaper.
However, there are still a couple of glaring omissions in its features specifically in terms of accessibility:
Whereas most blackberry devices are hearing-aid compatible (HAC), iPhone isn't. This simply means that about 20 millions of Americans that are born with (or have acquired) varied degrees of hearing loss throughout their lives are automatically excluded from iPhone's clientele since the phone cannot be used with a hearing aid's microphone (M) or telecoil (T) switches.
iPhone also does not support multiple languages i.e. languages other than English that the phone can be set to display its menus and text in. This also means that iPhone -perhaps inadvertently- excludes e.g. Spanish-speaking audiences from its clientele, unless of course they know to write and read in English.
It's high time that Apple opened its tech doors to the world. As long as it remains "exclusive" and in that sense esoteric to the masses, it may never attain the success and popularity of a Blackberry.

South and North California dichotomy

2008-06-07T21:36:00.005-04:00

It's one thing to hear it and totally another to actually live it.
Californians seem to have a good reason for being displeased with the stereotype.
Upon arrival in Northern Cali, I was welcomed by numerous friends and acquaintances who didn't know my exact location with a "Welcome to LA!". Ha! Not all Cali is LA and thank God for that! Unlike my American friends, my only reason of discontent with LA is the fact that it's a big city. I love almost every suburb around LA but I am not a big fan of LA itself. So when I correct my well-wishing friends, I have my reasons and they have theirs for looking at me with concern. I'm a few light years away from the local stereotypes but it's funny how assumptions work, especially when they are so obvious.

Resurfacing for good later in June! Enjoy summer, everyone!

2008-05-31T08:41:00.002-04:00

May has been a real long month.
Today the 31st I'm finally wrapping up business and moving on with my life.
Apologies for leaving this blog an orphan for so long.
I'll be back soon with daily bites.

resurfarcing...

2008-05-03T14:57:00.000-04:00

Coming up.......

2008 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

2008-05-03T14:37:00.004-04:00

What is the Computational Linguistics Olympiad?

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) is modeled after similar Linguistics Olympiads held in Eastern Europe since 1965. In these events, hundreds of high school age students have participated, challenged by interesting linguistic problems from dozens of the world's languages. In solving the problems, students learn about the richness, diversity and systematicity of language, while exercising natural logic and reasoning skills. No prior knowledge of particular languages or of linguistics is necessary, but the competitions have proven very successful in attracting top students to study and choose careers in fields of linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies.

Professional linguists and other specialists in natural language processing technologies cooperate to create stimulating and engaging problems that represent cutting edge theoretical and practical issues in their fields. This is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of what natural language processing in the 21st century is all about.

For details and past CL Olympiads visit: NACLO 2008

The unbearable lightness of being

2008-03-14T20:31:00.006-04:00

See the movie if you can. Better yet read the book (by Kundera).
A bit post-modernistic by some standards, I found it agrees with me these days.

semantic computing and "vaguely-formulated human intentions"

2008-03-04T09:54:00.002-05:00

The field of Semantic Computing (SC) brings together those disciplines concerned with connecting the (often vaguely-formulated) intentions of humans with computational content. This connection can go both ways: retrieving, using and manipulating existing content according to user's goals ("do what the user means"); and creating, rearranging, and managing content that matches the author's intentions ("do what the author means").

There is no such thing as "vaguely-formulated intentions of humans". Humans have intentions. Only the human who has expressed the specific intentions knows how vague or not these intentions were "formulated". How? Usually vague intentions bring about vague results or bring about undesired (unintended) results. It's all in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.

What's pertinent for CL and SemComputing here is the fact that intentions are hard to detect. We will never be 100% sure that we matched the intention of the author, neither should we even try for that. Regardless of what the author "meant" (which can be very imprecise and gauged only by the author's own judgement), a document bears evidence of such intentions. If we focus on the intentions evidently expressed in the document we can happily dispense with the "intentions of humans".

Keeping subjectivity out of CL...

2008-02-29T15:25:00.004-05:00

Reading the announcement about the COLING workshop on "human judgements in Computational Linguistics":

Human judgements play a key role in the development and the assessment of linguistic resources and methods in Computational Linguistics. [...]
We invite papers about experiments that collect human judgements for Computational Linguistic purposes, with a particular focus on linguistic tasks that are controversial from a theoretical point of view (e.g., some coding tasks having to do with semantics or pragmatics). Such experimental tasks are usually difficult to design and interpret, and they typically result in mediocre inter-rater reliability.

So let me think. "Coding tasks having to do with semantics and pragmatics" "typically result in mediocre inter-rater reliability". Seriously? So are we back to the 50s and Chomsky's concept of "ungrammaticality"? The dominance of syntax and the marginalization of semantics and pragmatics as "subjective"?
Now that we finally made it through enough of Chomsky 50+ years later, now that CL is finally breaking free of attempts to formalize semantics, now that we have finally figured it out how to relate language and information theory, we now willingly take a turn back and look at "human judgements"? Why? Language is definitely not created in a vacuum. Virtually every level of natural language (and hence also of CL) is potentially subjective in that it inevitably reflects the 'theory' of the linguist who looks at it. There is no way around this. Claiming that "some coding" is subjective implies that some other "coding" is not. Well, the point is that if it is not, then it has nothing to do with *natural* language.

Mental exercise of the day

2008-02-29T11:27:00.002-05:00

Focus on the negative and you will be immediately inundated by an avalanche of negative experience.

Focus on the positive, and more positive will turn up out of the blue...

On idiotic management...

2008-02-29T07:58:00.003-05:00

Managing people is hard enough. Managing smart people is definitely harder.
Managing smart people who constantly blabber about new technology must scare the hell out of most managers.

What takes the cake is:
Managing people and technology and making decisions without listening to your experts.
Managing people and technology and be too scared to make any decisions.

words....

2008-02-28T07:26:00.008-05:00

Interesting neologisms of the day (only read with a sense of humor):

celebritology, noun:
1. the study of the lives of celebrities
2. the endless gossip about Britney's life
3. the main subject of attention of the People magazine

chatological, adj. (as in "chatological humor", reminiscent of "eschatological"):
1. the system or theory concerning online chats, online chat rooms, and any other online life species
2. the branch of logic dealing with the same...

Interesting syntactic phenomenon of the day:

Clapton Invited to Play North Korea*

Lucky North Korea will be played by Clapton...

* to confirm the meaning of this schema look at the article

If it's text processing it is also batch processing...

2008-02-25T12:20:00.004-05:00

Here's a consequence of isolating web services from real text processing:

What about batch processing?

Tired of superficial text processing

2008-02-25T10:39:00.009-05:00

I've been looking at CALAIS the open-source web services for performing information extraction on Reuters data. The info extraction tech used under the hood is based on ClearForest's proprietary rule-based info extraction language called DIAL. Like SRA's and Inxight's (now Business Objects and SAP) similar tools of the trade, this type of languages are tailor-made for general purpose info extraction. The biggest asset of working with such tools is that they allow the developer to go as deep as she can and extend the original NLP basis in order to meet specific customer data and requirements. However, tools like CALAIS shift the focus majorly from the underlying NLP/IE technology to the web services and I/O front and related bells and whistles. They even offer "bounties" for innovative web service applications built for CALAIS. All this while the single most important and most attractive element of this tool is its NLP extensibility power! This remains concealed and under wraps with a roadmap promise to be released by the end of the year. Until then the tool runs with the out-of-the-box IE capabilities, which are -arguably- pretty limited and only impressive to those with limited prior NLP/IE experience. Does someone have their priorities screwed-up?

Semantic Web, the Wikipedia, TextLinguistics and Information Extraction

2008-02-24T12:24:00.007-05:00

Paraphrasing an article on AI3 published on Feb 18, 2008, there is finally a recognized collective wave of information extraction tools and sources that mine Wikipedia in order to help enrich the Semantic Web.

Here are a few instances that show-case the successful marriage of text-linguistics and information extraction:
-First paragraphs: Wikipedia articles are being mined for term definitions. It is standard text structure (even in Wikipedia articles) that in the first paragraph outlines the main terms discussed in the article. For this reason, initial paragraphs are good places for looking up terms in the document.
-Redirects: Mining for synomymous terms, spelling variations, abbreviations and other "equivalents" of a term is just par for the course.
-Document Title: This is where we locate named entities and domain-specific terms or semantic variants
-Subject Line and Section Headings: For category identification (topic classification)
-Full text: Whereas in the first paragraph new terms are being defined, it is in the rest of the document that one will find a full description of the definition/meaning, along with related terms, translations and other collocations (linguistic context).
-Embedded article links: Links to and by external pages provide more related terms, potential synonyms, clues for disambiguation and categorization.
-Embedded Lists (and other Hierarchies): Look here for hyponyms, meronyms and other semantic relationships among related terms.

Notice that all of the above are overt structural elements in Wikipedia articles. This type of structure is not unique in Wikipedia articles although Wikipedia standards impose a conscious effort for homogeneity. However, detecting such structural clues in text is no news in the field of text-linguistics (for seminal work in the field check here).
What's new here is the application of text-linguistics analysis techniques to the Web (and Wikipedia in particular) for purposes of Web mining, Information Extraction and the Semantic Web initiative.

The output of such analyses and metrics helps populate ontologies and taxonomies, as well as link records. Areas of focus for these types of application are:
-subcategorization
-WSD, NER and NED
-semantic similarity and relatedness analysis and metrics

Tools of the trade

2008-02-24T11:21:00.004-05:00

Try NoteTab Light a freeware with some commercial features available for a 31-day trial. It allows embedded scripting (html, PERL, Gawk). It looks pretty loaded in comparison with NotePad.

The hound that won the race...

2008-02-23T10:44:00.007-05:00

Dedicated to my "Phriends" in the throes of the dissertation journey.
You can do it!

What is it with students?

2008-02-23T09:27:00.005-05:00

OK -- you get in the trouble of contacting me with a question related to my doctoral dissertation that you have sitting in front of you. How flattering! Someone actually was interested enough to buy (and hopefully read?) my brainchild.
Now don't spoil the good news with 1) incredibly bad manners and 2) incredulously thick questions.
So to attend to 1, do follow proper email etiquette. By this I mean use a basic "Hi (FirstName)" salutation when you address someone you don't know over email. And while we are at it, please resist the temptation of (inadvertently) offending me by ascribing my brainchild to someone else... Thank you.
To attend to 2, just do not expect people to give you ready answers to q's they belabored for a while! It is called a doctoral dissertation for a reason! I didn't spend one day, one month or even one year on it, dude. Since you have bought it, do me a favor and actually read it or at least browse through its pages. What else can I say. Then, once you are in a place to form intelligent and respectful questions, come back to me. It is call "research" for a reason!

watching the news...

2008-02-23T09:03:00.003-05:00

The next big revolution will be in the direction of exercising judgment when it comes to information. Do I really need a daily depression dose by CNN and newspapers in order to "get it" that the economy is bad and people are losing their jobs and -most crucially- that the government isn't doing much about it? I say stop watching all this negativity and start doing something about it in your daily life: from voting, from questioning political practices, from living "in the present" and tuning in to what's happening around you (CNN won't tell you how many of your neighbors lost their jobs in the last X months). Open your eyes, be present and use judgment and common sense when it comes to "mass media". Above all THINK. Yes, use the substance in your skull that promotes intelligent life. Mass media perpetuate negativity. This is how it is. It's not to blame. It's up to you to "buy it" or not. I say use your own mind and separate yourself from the "mass". Then you have better chances of staying positive and do something in your life that promotes a change to the better.

two months later, I resurface...

2008-02-23T08:59:00.003-05:00

The Devil Wears Prada

2007-12-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

The DVD I got was ruined -doesn't show anything but a blank screen after you hit the play button. A shame, but I got a thorough review at the Movie Spoiler. Check it out for this and other movies. Those who don't want to be told how a movie ends, be aware, the Movie Spoiler is not your site ;-)

Here's the link:
The Devil Wears Prada

Beyond politics....

2007-12-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

A great woman lost her life yesterday...
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. RIP.

What do GATE, YALE and WEKA have in common?

2007-12-26T12:54:00.000-05:00

Other than being some of the most popular Java-based text mining systems, that is...

anyone saw Mars?

2007-12-25T21:22:00.000-05:00

Mars was supposed to be bright red in the sky next to a full Moon on Xmas Eve.
According to Yahoo News "Mars [was] unusually bright [on] Christmas Eve [...] — a development that might make Santa Claus rethink his need for Rudolph's red nose."
Of course the skies were overcast locally so I missed Mars. The Full Moon was brilliant though! ;-)

Merry Xmas!

2007-12-23T14:43:00.000-05:00

Holidays is what we make of them!
Enjoy!

ACL 2008

2007-12-16T21:37:00.001-05:00

ACL-08: HLT will be held in Columbus, Ohio. Deadline for paper submissions is Jan 10, 2008.
Notice that Information Extraction makes for a separate subfield/umbrella of topics acceptable for submission.

Snowbound...

2007-12-16T19:44:00.000-05:00

Crazy weather in the state of Ohio and most of the East Coast for the last few weeks and it isn't looking up any time soon. Apparently, according to the Weather Channel, apart from snow, we're also looking at Graupel, i.e. "a form of frozen precipitation consisting of snowflakes or ice crystals and super cooled water droplets frozen together", not to be confused with "icicles". All I know is that the temperature is down to 23oF/-5oC and feels much lower and lower by the hour.

Hello, World!

2007-12-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

Let there be light!