The Natural Language Software Registry (NLSR) is a concise summary
of the capabilities and sources of a large amount of natural language
processing (NLP) software available to the NLP community. It comprises
academic, commercial and proprietary software with specifications and
terms on which it can be acquired clearly indicated. Software is
organized into the following categories: Annotation Tools; Evaluation
Tools; Language Resources; Multimedia; Multimodality; NLP Development
Aid; Spoken Language; and, Written Language. Several hundred packages
are included.
Ask Jeeves Goes Back to Natural Language Searching
Ask Jeeves Goes Back to Natural Language Searching06/05/2005 11:20 PM When Ask Jeeves hit the scene lo these many years ago, they were known
for natural language searching. Ask a question, get an answer, or at
least a pointer to...
Natural language processing changes how shoppers search
New Natural Language Search Engine: Kozoru08/11/2004 08:21 AM Put Kozoru on your radar, they just got three million dollars in
financing. Nothing going on with their Web site at the moment, but a
couple things are interesting about...
MII Natural Language Processing Toolkit 1.0.1 (Default branch)
MII Natural Language Processing Toolkit 1.0.1 (Default branch)04/15/2005 05:46 PM
MII Natural Language Processing Toolkit is a toolkit for
medical natural language processing. The core engine is
general enough to be used in a variety of text processing
domains, though the toolkit includes specific support for
medical reports and patient de-identification.
Changes:
XML document support is now included in the toolkit.
Search for the Holy Grail of Natural Language Processing
Search for the Holy Grail of Natural Language Processing12/29/2004 03:34 AM This Natural Language Selection Engine uses a radically new method to
deliver contents on the fly. It uses Natural language Selection
methodologies to decipher what the user wants from the given input and
deliver content. [PRWEB Dec 29, 2004]
Natural Language Processing / Information Retrieval Software Repository
This directory and account holds centralized
software and tools for natural language processing (NLP) and
information retrieval (IR) research and teaching at the School of
Computing at the National University of Singapore. The account is
hosted off of sf3 such that students and researchers will be able to
get at these tools. Access is granted to all, however, if you'd like
to provide and/or install tools, you must first email the
administrators (rpnlpir@comp.... This directory has ben added to Directory Resources
Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
Computers as Linguists: Paraphrasing Natural Language (New York Times)
Natural Born Killers of PHP10/28/2003 11:08 PM Recently I revised Optimizing PHP, an article that I wrote in 2002.
I'm pleased to say that it hasn't aged much. The changes I had to make
include a recommendation to use FastCGI with IIS, adding Turck MMCache
to the opcode cache list, recommending Cache_Lite, replacing foreach
with list/each for large arrays, and the realisation that arrays need
to be passed by reference too.
Then I realized how much more I could have discussed. I started to
think more about performance profiling after discussing APD in a
previous post.
Now there is some logic to the fact that functions with many lines of
code will run slower than ones which are short and brief.
However sometimes it's the shortest code snippet that cause the real
slowdowns. That's because these code snippets call external functions
that hide a lot of complexity behind a deceptively simple and light
exterior. With any of the following natural born killers, one
thoughtless line of code can result in a unbearable x100 times
slowdown:
SQL statements - for example, adding a simple ORDER BY clause to a
query could cause a massive slowdown because all records will have to
be obtained on the server and sorted first before it is sent to the
PHP client.
Regular expressions - because regular expressions work by
back-tracking when a match fails, its common for a regular expression
to be exponentially expensive to compute. The longer the string, the
worse it becomes.
Network calls - the increasing popularity of SOAP and similar
inefficient but easy-to-use protocols open up new vistas of
unscalability for the unwary.
Classic performance tuning techniques used by XDebug and APD give you
a summary of all functions with long execution times. This is useful,
but we need tools to easily pinpoint, measure and tune the overhead of
killers such as SQL statements, regular expressions and RPC calls. I
think that we already have enough Open Source CMS projects out there.
Tuning tools like this are great idea for students and developers with
time to kill, looking for an interesting Open Source project to start.
Natural Born Chatter v2.9.703/19/2003 10:45 PM Natural Born Chatter is a multiple-mode user-friendly network
communication utility, including real-time chat, instant messaging and
exchange of files. It is intended to be used in small office or home
office (SOHO) local networks.
"While a business process is running," an IBM white paper on BPEL4WS
dryly notes, "it might be necessary to undo one of the steps that have
already been successfully completed." Translation: Things can get
screwed up, and then they need to be fixed. If there's anything
revolutionary about Web services, it's the notion that we'll be able
to deal with the inevitable screwups in more realistic and more
effective ways. Compensation can't simply mean what it does to a
programmer: chaining back through a nested series of automatic
exception handlers. We have to accept that it's often people who both
throw and handle the exceptions, and we have to build software systems
that gracefully include them. [Full story at Inf
oWorld.com]
This short article, part of InfoWorld's special
report on Web services, touches on some things I'll say more about
in my talk at XML
2003 next week.
...
Carver Mead?s Natural Inspiration
Carver Mead?s Natural Inspiration08/30/2004 04:24 AM Technology Review Aug 30 2004 8:44AM GMT Grok Description matches for It's only natural: Evaluation natural-language dialogs (VoiceXMLPlanet.com) GrokA matches for It's only natural: Evaluation natural-language dialogs (VoiceXMLPlanet.com)
Roomba Discover vs Sharper Image eVac
Roomba Discover vs Sharper Image eVac08/10/2004 10:18 AM Everyday Robots has posted a comparison
of the Roomba
Discovery and Sharper
Image eVac robot vacuum cleaners. It's
primarily a consumer-oriented review on points such as suction power
and
carpet types rather than more interesting things like hackability. But
if you're thinking about buying a robot vacuum for its intended
purpose,
this could be a helpful review.
A Less-Than-Sharper Image
A Less-Than-Sharper Image08/06/2004 02:43 PM The company lowers its earnings guidance as sales growth slips.
Sharper Image: All Hot Air?
Sharper Image: All Hot Air?05/27/2004 10:54 AM Great sales, great earnings, sinking stock price. What gives?
Uh oh! Are the robotic
vacuum cleaner wars about to get hotter? Can Australian newcomer
Floorbotics de-throne the champion Electrolux Trilobite? Can anyone
afford a $1k robot vacuum? Does anybody care? Will the larger
industrial version called the IVAC teach the others how to overthrow
their meat-clad masters? Are you going to eat that hot dog? Can I have
it? Read
[I4U]
Is .NET's 'C' Sharper Than C++ or Java?03/20/2003 01:05 PM According to Microsoft, its C# programming language promises rapid
development of Web services applications. But many are wondering
whether C# is just a rehash of Java that will bind developers even
more tightly to Microsoft's platforms -- or whether they might be
better off skipping Java and C# altogether and sticking with C or C++
instead.
Sharper Image's Stellar Q1
Sharper Image's Stellar Q105/21/2004 10:13 AM Do not underestimate the allure of the world's finest nose-hair
trimmer.
Kodak and IBM Shoot for Sharper Vision
Kodak and IBM Shoot for Sharper Vision09/16/2004 10:41 PM Eastman Kodak Company and IBM have banded together to sharpen the
vision of image sensors designed for use in digital still cameras and
camera phones. The collaboration marries Sony's complementary metal
oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processing with Kodak's existing image
sensor technologies in an attempt to sow a new breed of CMOS image
sensor (CIS) devices that are capable of matching the image quality of
charge-coupled devices (CCDs). Kodak and IBM will work together to
develop as well as manufacture the sensors.
hi, when will it ever end? more pixels-sharper images.whils
Webl0gs as Weapons (sharper than knives)04/20/2004 11:36 PM Pardon the INXS reference, but it seems appropriate. We've all heard
that weblogs are conversations, and we often assume that they are
generally productive conversations. Even when someone (like me) posts
a bitchy or uninformed entry, there's often some little bit of good to
come out of it. That's generally a testament to my readers. Some have
an uncanny ability to see what I'm getting at even when I can't quite
seem to make my real point. But it's not...
words as weapons sharper than knives
words as weapons sharper than knives01/28/2004 02:33 PM I've got several "irons in the fire" as they say over near the
chuckwagon, so producing original material for WWdN is going to be
difficult for a few days.
However, in a shameless effort to keep you around, I'll do my best to
link at least one amusing / interesting / useful link a day until I
can scrape some stuff out of the creative portion of my skull.
Chatter surrounding iWork — then called iWorks, as
it was speculated to be the successor to AppleWorks — first
emerged almost two years ago. Since then, iWork has become a perennial
rumor favorite, as AppleWorks 6 continues to show its age and lack of
refinement associated with Apple's applications today. Steve Jobs
introduced AppleWorks 6 during Macworld Expo San Francisco in 2000,
making the application a dinosaur in software years by today's
standards.
iWork 1.4.6
iWork 1.4.612/31/2003 09:43 PM Intuitive time billing and invoicing app.
warez.metafilter.com
warez.metafilter.com08/27/2004 01:51 PM
After the FBI raid five pople's homes (and the offices of one ISP) seizing
their equipment for operating a "network" sharing the
equivalent of
60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs (according to Mr Ashcroft) as
part of Operation Digital Gridlock's attempts to crack the
"organisation" known as The Underground Network (and perhaps
to rail against the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' recent decision
backing up the legality of P2P networks) one of those raided -
"The Answer Man" - contacts P2Pnet, to give the inside scoop and talk about the
distortions created by the media reporting of the case.
[Thanks Squeak]
Update: iWork 2.0.1
Update: iWork 2.0.101/26/2004 10:18 AM The time billing and invoicing application adds networking (iWork
Server and Client only), adding of project due dates to iCal,
estimates, and more.
17 Things You Might Not Know You Could Do With iWork
Apple iWork '0504/18/2005 04:42 PM With built-in designs for documents and presentations, seamless
integration with iLife media and an easy to use toolbar, Apple has
brought professional design capabilities to the average Mac user with
iWork.
iWork consists of Pages, Apple’s new word processing application
designed to replace AppleWorks, and Keynote 2.0, a flexible
application for producing presentations, interactive slideshows, and
more.
Although Pages wasn’t created to be in the same league as the pro apps
like QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign, it gives everyone the ability to
easily create great looking documents. It comes with about 40 design
templates that cover everything from invitations to newsletters,
brochures, press releases and school or business reports.
It is a simple, clean program for the non-professional designer, with
import and export capabilities with Microsoft Word, pdf, HTML, RTF and
plain text. Documents are created by simply dragging pictures and
images onto it, resizing them and placing them by using your mouse to
pull or push the corners to the proper perspective. Just one click
inserts tables and charts or changes colors and font styles. Easily
apply, edit, and create new paragraph, character, and list styles.
With Keynote 2, Apple has added the ability to export a presentation
in flash or QuickTime formats and improved the compatibility with
AppleWorks and PowerPoint. Keynote 2 comes with 10 new themes for
presentations, kiosks, portfolios, and storyboards, including the
creation of self-playing presentations.
Also with this new version, Keynote also has been given the ability to
embed a web page and have it update every time the slideshow is run.
The site remains fully accessible, and clicking on any of its links
will launch the page in Safari. Keynote will drop to the background,
and its Dock icon will adopt a green play icon. Clicking this returns
you to your presentation.
One of the biggest changes to Keynote with this upgrade, is the
addition of a Presenter mode, in which a presentation can be previewed
and managed. In addition to displaying your presenter notes, it can
now add current and next slides and a clock and a timer (showing
either how long you have left to speak or how long you have been
talking). Each element can be resized and dragged to wherever on the
screen suits you best, so if you would rather have a large view of the
current slide and a small preview of the next, you can.
Of the two iWork applications, Keynote is easier to use, thanks to
automatic guides and layouts. The common elements shared by both Pages
and Keynote mean the two applications complement each other very well
and after using one, the other seems immediately familiar. Also, if
you require more templates than those provided by Apple, more can be
found at http://www.iworkcommunity.com/.
iWork is not the Microsoft Office killer that some pre-release rumors
suggested, but priced at $79, it is well worth the cost if you want to
create professional newsletters, brochures and office presentations.
System requirements:
• Macintosh computer with 500MHz or faster PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 (G4
for PowerBook); G4 or G5 recommended
• 128MB of RAM (512MB recommended)
• 8MB of video memory (32MB recommended)
• Mac OS X v10.3.6 or later
• QuickTime 6.5 or later
• iLife '04 or later recommended
• 1GB of available disk space
• DVD drive required to install applications
(CD version available at www.apple.com/store)
Pros:
Easy user interface
Compatibility with PowerPoint and Word
Large catalogue of free, professionally-designed templates
Cons:
No word counter
No grammar checker
If your company has a product you would like Spymac to review, please
send an email to news@spymac.com.
Report: iWork
Report: iWork02/01/2005 08:47 PM
positive Pages experiences, cataloging missing features, and a
MailMerge AppleScript
iWork Updates Now Available
iWork Updates Now Available03/19/2005 03:11 AM
Now available via Software Update for current iWork owners:
Keynote 2.0.1
Keynote 2.0.1 addresses isolated issues that may have affected
reliabili...
Bram: BitTorrent use up, it's not all warez01/07/2005 04:41 AM Cory Doctorow:
Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, "I'd like to point out
that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have
been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down
slightly. There's a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost
exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves
use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply
untrue."
Link
(via Waxy)
FBI Takes Down Warez Group04/22/2004 08:00 PM An update to the earlier story we had on a schoo
ls being raided by the FBI for sharing music files, here's the
news on a larger FBI operation to shut down a larger software, music and movies
warez group. This makes more sense than just going after file
sharing, but it still makes you wonder. There is this huge terrorist
threat thing going on right now, and you would think that it might
make more sense for the FBI to protect us from being blown up than to
worry about people sharing music files that they can probably get on
file sharing networks anyway.
Apple: iWork update
Apple: iWork update03/19/2005 02:33 AM Apple released Pages 1.0.1 and Keynote 2.0.1 via Software Update to
address reliability issues.
