Yay!
Dr. Christopher Manning’s course on Natural Language Processing at Stanford* is now online with streaming video and transcripts.
Apparently whatever the copyright issues were has been resolved by editing out particular parts of particular lectures.
Well, it’s still a first for online NLP education as far as I know, and you can’t beat the price.
* Go Bears
So like, are there non-English dialects of lolcat out there, somewhere?
The world needs to know.
Kthx.
Dear lazyweb,
I would like a Javascript function to work like this:
magicalFunction('カ')
→ 'Katakana'
magicalFunction('a')
→ 'Latin'
magicalFunction('አ')
→ 'Ethiopic'
In other words, I want to be able to access the script property described in UAX #24: Script Names.
This actually exists already in Perl regular expressions, where you can just say \p{Katakana} in a regex to match Katakana characters.
Maybe such a thing could end up in the next version of Javascript… not that I have the slightest idea where to make that suggestion. But in the meantime, it seems to me that there should be a unicodescripts.js or some such.
Any ideas on what would be an efficient programming approach to implementing such a data structure, something that might be reasonably squeezed into a .js file?
Update: Longtime reader Edward O’Connor emails to suggest xregexp:
…you should check out the unicode plugin for xregexp:
http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/xregexp-unicode-pluginThis does pretty much exactly what you want.
Lazyweb, the greatest programming platform in history!
In vaguely related news, rubyistas out there should check out Edwards’s talk from MerbCamp.
Yippee! Angry language arguments!
Scene the first:
Kid in South Africa decides to study Zulu instead of Afrikaans, because he says Afrikaans is dying:
The Times - White schoolboy chooses to learn Zulu over ‘dying language’
Scene the second:
Inevitable “Oh yeah???” response:
The Times - Afrikaans very much alive and kicking
I have no insights on this matter.
That is all.
The article here is interesting in its own right, but I just thought I’d point out an interesting note which caught my attention:
Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted in English and Korean, and the article was written in Korean. Mr. Wales’s comments have therefore been translated from English to Korean and back into English.
[Interview] Wikipedia founder critical of real-name Internet system
In the wake of my painfully hand-constructed survey of languages on twitter on election night , my interest is piqued: what would it take to come up with some REAL numbers, automatically?
The problem with running statistically language identification on Twitter is that twits are too short—140 characters.* My simple language ID tool needs a lot more than that.
But it seems to me that there is a good solution, like this:
I’ll get around to that… any minute now.
*Incidentally, do multibyte languages get their maximum length cropped on Twitter?
A while back I posted about an interesting experiment on sending fonts over the web as Javascript. Here’s a look at a more robust solution to the same problem: web fonts.
Check out this list of Wikipedias. Do you see a lot of question marks or little meaningless boxes? The reason you get that junk is that you don’t happen to have the right fonts installed locally on your computer.
That sucks. It’s not fair. Why should English or French or Russian or Japanese speakers be treated as first-class citizens of the web, but Tibetan or Khmer or Inuktitut speakers be treated as weirdos?
When “web fonts” catch on, this regrettable state of affairs could start to fade away. Content providers will be able to host fonts on the server, right next to the content requiring those fonts, thus ensuring that readers will be able to see content in any language.
John Resig has an article that explains how all this works: An introduction to W3C Web Fonts. Happily, as John points out, it seems that browser support for web fonts is on the upswing.
I’m convinced that a lack of fonts is a major barrier to an increase in the amount of content in certain languages on the web. Web fonts would go a long way toward fulfilling the “world wide” promise of the World Wide Web.
I ran across this on the Wikipedia mailing list and thought I’d repost it for my fellow language nerds:
We’re working on an update to the Wikipedia logo, which can be used in 3-D, which will be correcting all the incorrect glyphs, and include
many other scripts that are not presently in the logo.The project page is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Logo and we’re still looking for community members to discuss, to help sort
out characters, font styles and representations for the additional
alphabets as well as continue discussing the current glyphs on the
talk page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikipedia/Logo.Your input is greatly appreciated!
That post was from Cary Bass.
The project page has a nifty diagram of the work in progress (where you can see the borked up Katakana on the current logo, can’t believe I’d never noticed that before…):
We’re going to go out on a limb here, and call it for Spanish:
1 cs 1 el 1 nl 1 no 1 sv 1 th 1 zh 3 ro 6 it 13 de 15 fr 23 pt 26 es
http://twitter.com/drturnuseverin/status/990376485 http://twitter.com/memoriavirtual/status/990399354 http://twitter.com/ToobyTweet/status/990403106 http://twitter.com/elnuevodia/status/990442096 http://twitter.com/emtemporeal/status/990444566 http://twitter.com/Octa/status/990417495 http://twitter.com/marcovicini/status/990449383 http://twitter.com/gigold/status/990457821 http://twitter.com/david_martos/status/990456842 http://twitter.com/vascocampilho/status/990472707 http://twitter.com/rafaelrodrigues/status/990473585 http://twitter.com/piticanella/status/990477228 http://twitter.com/enricoescalona/status/990480981 http://twitter.com/pickupjojo/status/990482411 http://twitter.com/metalkrim/status/990484675 http://twitter.com/Solrak/status/990486778 http://twitter.com/panconqueso/status/990486766 http://twitter.com/versac/status/990486748 http://twitter.com/cleitonkamikaze/status/990489746 http://twitter.com/panconqueso/status/990488965 http://twitter.com/ToobyTweet/status/990493358 http://twitter.com/sepulveda/status/990492554 http://twitter.com/geografosubjeti/status/990490375 http://twitter.com/zolliker/status/990494120 http://twitter.com/lciusa2008/status/990496903 http://twitter.com/denispedroso/status/990495493 http://twitter.com/yuri_music/status/990505305 http://twitter.com/viniciuskmax/status/990503799 http://twitter.com/Tim_Booth/status/990502126 http://twitter.com/DerWesten/status/990499340 http://twitter.com/ghostdog19/status/990510542 http://twitter.com/Curvaspoliticas/status/990508418 http://twitter.com/rdc/status/990511316 http://twitter.com/danzflor/status/990511263 http://twitter.com/upmarine/status/990513273 http://twitter.com/alaovest/status/990514628 http://www.welt.de/politik/article2676551/Barack-Obama-siegt-und-siegt-und-siegt.html#reqRSS http://twitter.com/fraugrasdackel/status/990517518 http://twitter.com/TheGhost/status/990516827 http://twitter.com/teletekst/status/990519501 http://twitter.com/Neto/status/990519503 http://twitter.com/Cooperativa/status/990524619 http://twitter.com/teban/status/990522421 http://twitter.com/gazetadopovo/status/990525502 http://twitter.com/dsobuitenland/status/990526198 http://twitter.com/inixia/status/990528510 http://twitter.com/bank_xavi/status/990535142 http://twitter.com/lilaEule/status/990540587 http://twitter.com/notivagos/status/990539959 http://twitter.com/touffik91/status/990541813 http://twitter.com/marieclairee/status/990541801 http://twitter.com/PhilippG/status/990541769 http://twitter.com/noticiasrtp/status/990541722 http://twitter.com/Emergent007/status/990547657 http://twitter.com/florida_mike/status/990548476 http://twitter.com/florida_mike/status/990548476 http://twitter.com/ToobyTweet/status/990549906 http://twitter.com/magicasland/status/990553319 http://twitter.com/Emergent007/status/990554709 http://twitter.com/pedrooliver/status/990556803 http://twitter.com/pickupjojo/status/990558617 http://twitter.com/juancamon/status/990558117 http://twitter.com/alexvalente/status/990562733 http://twitter.com/biab/status/990560773 http://twitter.com/Wikio_LaUne/status/990564799 http://twitter.com/cotidianul/status/990564115 http://twitter.com/Miuxapop/status/990564110 http://twitter.com/Wikio_LaUne/status/990564799 http://twitter.com/Borsenalle/status/990559355 http://twitter.com/timdream/status/990568725 http://twitter.com/Anomalo/status/990567489 http://twitter.com/FoggyMind/status/990572601 http://twitter.com/deredgar/status/990572597 http://twitter.com/ghostdog19/status/990572574 http://twitter.com/ladylazarus/status/990575996 http://twitter.com/beeck/status/990580824 http://twitter.com/geografosubjeti/status/990577280 http://twitter.com/genevenews/status/990584686 http://twitter.com/admiyn/status/990588709 http://twitter.com/petevalle/status/990590484 http://twitter.com/matyasgabor/status/990592124 http://twitter.com/TSFRadio/status/990592956 http://twitter.com/YannickGelinas/status/990594621 http://twitter.com/geografosubjeti/status/990596911 http://twitter.com/news_rss/status/990599330 http://twitter.com/juanlusanchez/status/990598555 http://twitter.com/_tillwe_/status/990597742 http://twitter.com/cashblog/status/990597701 http://twitter.com/coreanomac/status/990601582 http://twitter.com/lanacioncom/status/990615456 http://twitter.com/DiamondLion/status/990623868 http://twitter.com/matesola/status/990603066 http://twitter.com/cotidianul/status/990630327
As a famous pig once put it, “That’ll do.”