Friday, April 21, 2006

Minorthird

MinorThird is a collection of Java classes for storing text, annotating text, and learning to extract entities and categorize text. It was written primarily by Dr William W. Cohen. It comes with a collection of publically-available extraction problems in Minorthird format (about 2Mb).

Minorthird differs from existing NLP and learning toolkits in a number of ways:


  • Unlike many NLP packages (eg GATE, Alembic) it combines tools for annotating and visualizing text with state-of-the art learning methods.

  • Unlike many other learning packages, it contains methods to visualize both training data and the performance of classifiers, which facilitates debugging.

  • Unlike other learning packages less tightly integrated with text manipulation tools, it is possible to track and visualize the transformation of text data into machine learning data.

  • Unlike many packages (including WEKA), it is open-source, and available for both commercial and research purposes.

  • Unlike any open-source learning systems I know of, it is architected to support active learning and on-line learning, which should facilitate integration of learning methods into agents.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

AJAX and "mashups"

Google has been an accidental catalyst for two major advances in Web application development: AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and "mashups" (new applications created by blending data and tools from different sources).
Stacy Cowley, Google Attracts Developers, IDG News Service, 11/23/2005.

Skepticism on the Semantic Web vision

Rob McCool, Rethinking the Semantic Web, Part 1, IEEE Internet Computing, Nov./Dec. issue, 2005, pp. 88.
"This column proposes several reasons that the Semantic Web vision hasn't been adopted. Part two will present an alternate approach."

Monday, November 21, 2005

New Introductory Book on Web Search

Prof. Mark Levene at Birkbeck, University of London has written a new book: An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation. It is ideal for undergraduates studying web search, and those on general web technology courses.