Friday, July 18, 2008

Diigo

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.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

start-up effort in sentiment detection and analysis

"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.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

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

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.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Euro 2008

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

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.

Monday, June 9, 2008

iPhone

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.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

South and North California dichotomy

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.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

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

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.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

resurfarcing...

Coming up.......

2008 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

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