David Ayre's blog

A verb conjugating system allows a user to input a form of a verb and display the verb forms. The verb conjugating system allows the user to input the infinitive form or non-infinitive forms of a verb. When a user inputs a non-infinitive form of a verb, the verb conjugating system identifies a corresponding base form of the verb. The verb conjugating system then uses the base form to retrieve and display the verb forms for the verb. The verb conjugating system may highlight the non-infinitive form of the verb within the displayed verb forms to assist the user in locating the verb form of interest.

Google Research announced today that they will be releasing their N-gram data to the public. N-gram models are a type of statistical model used to predict the occurance likelihood of the next item in a sequence, in this case, the items are words. N-gram models are used in a number of computational linguistics tasks like translation, part of speech tagging and word sense disambiguation.

A funny clip from the VH1 SuperGroup reality series which I think typifies the verbal branding attempts of most bands. The show documents the formation of the next "supergroup" featuring Ted Nugent, Scott Ian, Sebastian Bach, Evan Seinfeld and Jason Bonham who are "poised to re-conquer the rock world". This clip centers around the naming of the band. Sebastian Bach comes up with the name which he thinks is perfect.

I came to the nora project via a mention of it on the Text Analytics mailing list. The goal of the project is to support Humanities scholars in the interpretation of literary works. I had a look at the demo video which shows the use of the noraVis prototype data mining and visualization software.

The demo video can be viewed here .

Over at Jim Carpenter's blog, he has a series building on why aesthetic language generation (ALG) is difficult. There are plenty of discussions on the nature of working with aesthetic text generation systems from a writer/reader perspective, but very little on the challenges and questions raised in the actual construction of these systems (outside of the purely technical discussions within fields like Computational Linguistics). Jim has constructed a large scale electronic text composition system entitled "Erica T. Carter" and knows first hand the issues involved. Anyone interested in this area should keep an eye on his posts.

The performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery Friday on Oct 28, 2005 was great. I was a bit nervous from the rehersal the night before. I had incorporated the rhyming code i’ve been working on into the template generation system and we made some last minute tweeks at the rehersal which were causing some occasional runtime errors. Running of the software over again would usually produce the desired result. The system generated two texts for the performance, one a more abstract piece, the second a set of rhyming couplets. During testing and rehersal, the abstract piece always seemed much stronger than the rhyming couplets… but at the performance, the abstract piece came out kind of clunky, a bit too long, but the rhyming couplets were just right, humorous and strangley abstract and contextually relevant at the same time…. Unfortunately, after the performance, the texts were lost in the digital ether.

Last year i worked on a templating language and interpretive engine to generate text. The system functioned very similar to the way the Andrew Bulhak’s Dada text generation engine worked (similar grammar etc..). The Dada engine was responsible for the well known Postmodern Essay Generator. I’ve expanded on the functionality quite a bit to tie in with some code i’ve written the last little whlie to find rhymes for certain words. The rhyming engine has knowledge of 11 types of rhyme.

Perl

Below are links to information about the language, books on learning and using Perl, links to various distributions for download and a long list of various Perl modules one can download to add functionality to their programs. Experiment and have fun !

Wow ! is making a comback in 2006.... Google recently launched their "Google Trends " site which enables the user to enter a few search terms and view their corresponding frequency distributions over time. Most frequency related data for words is usually restricted to usage counts within a particular text, or throughout a set of texts without any temporal attributes factored in.