Writ of Hapaxeas Corpus

Words for Snow

Alexandra Stalnacke — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:43:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Dialects and armies

sderose — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:33:00 GMT

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...(read more)

IBM: How to Generate an Ontology from a Tag Cloud

Alexandra Stalnacke — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:04:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Facebook vs. Google

sderose — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:19:00 GMT

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?

Alexandra Stalnacke — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:33:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Turing, or not Turing

sderose — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:54:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Linguistic Variables in Fuzzy Logic

Alexandra Stalnacke — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:01:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Google defines The Meaning of Open

Alexandra Stalnacke — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:20:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Obama has spoken at #Cop15

Alexandra Stalnacke — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:19:00 GMT

...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...(read more)

TSA leaks sensitive documents via PDF editing

sderose — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:55:00 GMT

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...(read more)

The First Search Engine?

Alexandra Stalnacke — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:06:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Amping the Tube

Adam Svanberg — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:05:00 GMT

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...(read more)

2009 Semantic Web Challenge

sderose — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:06:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Microsoft Patents Sudo?

Alexandra Stalnacke — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:36:00 GMT

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...(read more)

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

Maria Milusheva — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:53:00 GMT

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...(read more)