11:37 am, 19 Oct 03
things i've been impressed by lately
Amazon’s talk: by exposing their web API, people were using it in all sorts of imaginate ways. How imaginative? Someone made some software where you could use a camera cell phone to take a picture of a barcode in a store; the software would then query Amazon for their price for the product and send it back to your phone.
Word meanings: rather than trying to use top-down dictionary definitions to get the meanings of words, researchers in 1995 tried it the way humans do it. They downloaded 300 million words of Usenet then analyzed them just for their (lexical!) context. Then the “difference” between words could be calculated, and (at least in the picture in this book) words like puppy and dog are near each other, while america and europe are far away from those but also clustered together.
Word meanings: rather than trying to use top-down dictionary definitions to get the meanings of words, researchers in 1995 tried it the way humans do it. They downloaded 300 million words of Usenet then analyzed them just for their (lexical!) context. Then the “difference” between words could be calculated, and (at least in the picture in this book) words like puppy and dog are near each other, while america and europe are far away from those but also clustered together.
I've been thinking about using my Nokia 3650 to read barcodes. I found an app a long time ago that attempts to do it, but when you position the camera over a barcode, it crashes on attempting to decode it.
I was thinking about making some sort of "comparison shopping" app for it once it could decode barcodes. You could scan in a barcode at the store, enter the price, and it'd tell you how much the item is at other stores in the area (based on your location -- approximated by determining which cell tower you're connected to). The data would all be user-submitted, although I could potentially see turning it into a business by allowing stores to somehow automatically enter their sale prices in the database.
"the way humans do it"
Speaking in the same vein, do you know of any NL projects working with phonetic transcriptions of sentences instead of the written forms? Somehow that seems more "natural" to me, even though it's mostly just adding a useless step to the process.word meanings
There was an interesting hybrid approach to word-meaning inference in a recent issue of Computational Linguistics, where they inferred from WordNet and EuroNet and extracted meaning clusters from the bits that translated back and forth reliably -- and from the bits that translated less-reliably (into multiple clusters in the other language), you could learn a list of possibly-unrelated senses for a given word in the language of origin. I dont' have a link for it or I'd post one.Nifty stuff.