Writ of Hapaxeas Corpus

Words for Snow

2010-03-10T09:43:00Z

Stockholm, March 10, 2010 Winter still holds us in a firm grip. The sky is high, the air crisp. Waiting for the morning train I stamp my feet to keep warm, snort and shade my eyes for the bright sun. I think about the popular urban snowy legend again, the one about the Eskimo and the number of words for snow . Just the thing to be thinking about a beautiful morning like this, heading to work. As some of you might know by now, I have three kids. I bet if you asked them about this winter, they'd...(read more)

Dialects and armies

2010-02-23T16:33:00Z

The corpus linguistics discussion list (corpora-request@uib.no) has been discussing an interesting question: what's the difference between a "dialect" and a "language"? Linguists' traditional answer is that a language is a dialect that has an army (this quote apparently traces to a talk by Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich; interesting since Yiddish is a counter-example to that definition). Several people made the point that corpus analysis can't get at that distinction...(read more)

IBM: How to Generate an Ontology from a Tag Cloud

2010-02-18T14:04:00Z

The USPTO recently published a Patent application by IBM, named DERIVING ONTOLOGY BASED ON LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNITY TAG CLOUDS The application is filed in 2008 and presents ideas around the semantic web, and how to enhance categorization and tagging of web content, by applying ontology and relationships to traditional tag clouds. The application describes the weaknesses of the semantic web (as understood in 2008) like this: “The semantic web is an extension of the World Wide Web where the...(read more)

Facebook vs. Google

2010-02-16T16:19:00Z

Mike Melanson, who blogs for ReadWriteWeb, an Internet-news website, wrote an article about how Facebook seems to be trying to become everyone's "universal login" -- making your Facebook identity your key to lots of other things. Simple enough.

Melanson's blog entry climbed to the top Google hit for "Facebook login". Probably that's because Google knows it's a blog, and blogs are timely, and timely information is good.

Do you see the headlight of the oncoming train?

...(read more)

Which ActionType are You?

2010-02-03T21:33:00Z

A lot of new cool stuff has been released in the new version of OpenAmplify, the 2.0 Version: Text-level Polarity, Guidance, Decisiveness and Temporality; NER - Named Entity Recognition; PinPoint to name some. One thing that is not mentioned in any release note, is the fact that we try to enhance our Signals whenever we can, wherever we can. Smaller changes, like resource and list updates, are made basically every day. The OpenAmplify codebase is completely depending on linguistic resource files...(read more)

Turing, or not Turing

2010-01-26T19:54:00Z

You may have heard of the "Turing Test." It was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a way to determine whether an Artificial Intelligence system "can think." There's extensive debate about whether it's even possible in principle to build a device which can properly be spoken of as "thinking"; but at this point AI is so far away, that we can put off that question for some time. (One exception is a program known as PARRY, which was designed to imitate the conversation...(read more)

Linguistic Variables in Fuzzy Logic

2010-01-26T13:01:00Z

Last Friday I had a dinner party. We’re a group of families in my neighborhood that take turns in cooking Friday dinner. This last Friday a few extras were invited and the number of guests around my table ended at 17. I enjoy all kind of social events and the five years we’ve been sharing the Friday dinners like this, have slowly made me evolve from being somebody who cooked and ate mostly because life required it, to actually taking pleasure in planning table setting, reading recipes...(read more)

Google defines The Meaning of Open

2009-12-22T12:20:00Z

In yesterday's post from the Official Google Blog, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management, gives the Google take on The Meaning of Open. It's a great long piece on the beauty of openness, well worth reading: According to Rosenberg, Google believes that open systems win. "They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses.." "...whenever possible, use existing open...(read more)

Obama has spoken at #Cop15

2009-12-18T14:19:00Z

...And the world was listening. But what did the President say? Not surprisingly, he spoke about Politics. To be more specific, about America, the world and the danger of climate change. His tone was informative: he offered a lot of guidance. His language was rich and "flowery". More, he talked about believing, making the right choices and commitments and meeting his reponsibilities. The reactions in Bella center appear to be overall quite negative: "Nothing new", "nothing...(read more)

TSA leaks sensitive documents via PDF editing

2009-12-09T20:55:00Z

This week news broke about TSA (the US Agency that handles airport security) leaking a sensitive manual on airport screening procedures -- see http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-leak/ . It includes information about how to pick which passengers to do extra screening on; what kinds of things the metal detectors do and don't pick up; what objects (like wheelchairs) don't need to be thoroughly inspected; and so on. It also has images of official government IDs, and what to look for...(read more)

The First Search Engine?

2009-11-25T09:06:00Z

Do you remember which search engine came first? Back in days of the turn of the century, we at Hapax (the mother company of OpenAmplify) were focused on creating our search engine: The FindEngine™, an NLP-based Question-Answering system. Back then, the relevant search engines had names like Altavista, Infoseek, Inktomi, and Yahoo. A few people had heard about Autonomy. Today, ten years later, the use of search engines has become an everyday act. During our work days we google for information...(read more)

Amping the Tube

2009-11-24T10:05:00Z

Google recently announced that they are adding (highly) experimental support for automatic captions in YouTube videos. The captions are added using Google's own speech-to-text technology, and will initially only be available for a few selected partner channels, for example UC Berkley . I tried it out in a few different videos, and I have to say I'm not super-impressed with the result. Even when there is just one single speaker in an otherwise quiet setting (a lecture or speech), the transcription...(read more)

2009 Semantic Web Challenge

2009-11-13T19:06:00Z

From http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_01355 -- winners of the SW Challenge. Especially interesting is "Scalable Reduction", which promises help in dealing with huge collections of harvested RDF data that haven't been vetted (hence are of inconsistent/unknown quality): Amsterdam, 9 November 2009 - Elsevier announced the winners of the 2009 Semantic Web Challenge, which took place at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Washington...(read more)

Microsoft Patents Sudo?

2009-11-13T09:36:00Z

Picked up from a Groklaw report from November 11 2009: "Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo..." Sudo is a command that enables a user to input a password to do a task the user doesn't normally have permission to do. It's a standard open source command in Linux operating systems and Apple's Mac OSX. Sudo's main web page gives the following description: "Sudo (su "do") allows a system administrator to delegate...(read more)

Where were you at 11:49 a.m. on October 17?

2009-11-12T09:53:00Z

Oh, you can't really remember straight away? Hmm, was October 17 a work day or not? Chances are that somebody, or something, remembers it for you. The New York Times recently wrote about a young man suspected of robbery whose alibi was supported by a Facebook status update . The update had been made at the time of the robbery from a computer in the suspect's father's apartment. Together with the father's testimony, the status update was sufficient to prove the suspect's innocence...(read more)