Computational Linguistics

Netflix prize must be doing well, as there are now other companies willing to tap into web’s researchers with deep knowledge of computational techniques. The latest company is Spock, a company so new that you have to read 3rd party sites to figure out exactly what they do. Even to use it, one has to signup for the account. Basically, Spock is about the search with the strong focus on the people mentions.

UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) project has recently transitioned from IBM to the Apache incubator. This is only for the open source part, the commercial part is - and will stay - with IBM. I have last written about UIMA a very long time ago (1, 2) , so I decided to give it another look. It is still as complicated as ever and it still takes a couple of hours of browsing documentation before one can run a basic example.

Lots of new sightings of CL/NLP technologies since the last update: On the commercial speech recognition front, Nexidia is currently in beta with phonemes-mapping audio search. But don’t go to the company’s site. Instead, read the explanation and collection of links is in the ResourceShelf’s article. If, instead of waiting for commercial offerings, you would like to contribute to the open source one, VoxForge always needs more transcribed audio recordings to improve their Command and Control acoustic models.

In my last update on applied computational linguistics, I have written about PodZinger that uses speech recognition to figure out which advertisement to match to the podcast you are searching with their service. Another company is claiming to do that with songs - Lirix. Their upcoming AdLirix platform is supposed to be so effective that Lirix would be able to give away songs for free and make back the income by embedding well-targeted advertisements.

Nine months ago, I had asked “Where are the blogs of computational linguists?” Now, there is an answer. The Association for Computational Linguistics has moved its documents (formerly ACL Universe) into the Wiki and there is now a separate page for blogs. It has all of the blogs I found so far and more. It even has my blog in it. Must be scraping the bottom of the barrel 🙂 .