Archive: November 08, 2005

Tuesday, November 8, 2005

1. WHEDONesque: Firefly soundtrack released on CD today in the States. Woo. Only question is whether they've been able to fit a good enough portion of the wonderful music from the show on this CD, or whether it'll be disappointingly incomplete.

     ¶ (4) Tags: [TV/Movies]

2. Slides from Steve Dekorte's OOPSLA 2005 talk on Io.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

3. Computer program learns language rules and composes sentences, all without outside help. Never linked this interesting article on "ADIOS" back when I first came across it.

   "The algorithm... for language learning and processing that we have developed can take a body of text, abstract from it a collection of recurring patterns or rules and then generate new material," explained Shimon Edelman... "This is the first time an unsupervised algorithm is shown capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical new sentences and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics," he said.
   
   Unlike previous attempts at developing computer algorithms for language learning, the new method, called Automatic Distillation of Structure (ADIOS), successfully identifies complex patterns in raw texts. The algorithm discovers the patterns by repeatedly aligning sentences and looking for overlapping parts.
   
   For example, the sentences I would like to book a first-class flight to Chicago, I want to book a first-class flight to Boston and Book a first-class flight for me, please may give rise to the pattern book a first-class flight -- if this candidate pattern passes the novel statistical significance test that is the core of the algorithm.
   
   If the system also encounters the sentences I need to book a direct flight from New York to Tel Aviv and I would like to book an economy flight, it may infer that the phrases first-class, direct and economy are equivalent in the context of the new pattern. "Because such equivalence sets can contain other patterns -- in turn containing further patterns, and so on -- the resulting body of knowledge grows recursively, as a sort of forest of branching trees of possibilities," said Edelman.

   The ADIOS homepage appears to be down at the moment. Update: up now.

     ¶ (2) Tags: [Programming, Science]

4. "Overlawyered explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public's expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability." -- posted by Matt.

   Update: Also see Point of Law, a more technical legal blog by the same people.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

5. Check out Ergodex, an extremely customizable "keyboard". Oh, while I'm here, check out Das Keyboard too.

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