Github just announced their own version of the Netflix Prize. Instead of predicting movie ratings, Github wants you to suggest repositories for users to watch. This is different from the Netflix Prize in a number of ways: a user watching a repo is similar to a user visiting a page from a search engine – [...]
Archive for July, 2009
Github announces recommender system contest
Posted: 30 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: contests, github, netflix prize, recommender systems
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Updates to lda-ruby gem
Posted: 30 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: c, computational linguistics, latent dirichlet allocation, lda, machine learning, nlp, ruby, rubygems, topic modeling
A while back I ported David Blei’s lda-c code for performing Latent Dirichlet Allocation to Ruby. Basically I just wrapped the C methods in a Ruby class, turned it into a gem, and called it a day. The result was a bit ugly and unwieldy, like most research code. A few months later, Todd Fisher [...]
Porting the UEA-Lite Stemmer to Ruby
Posted: 16 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, finite state transducers, github, information retrieval, nlp, open source software, ruby, software, stemmers, stemming
A twitter friend (@communicating) tipped me off to the UEA-Lite Stemmer by Marie-Claire Jenkins and Dan J. Smith. Stemmers are NLP tools that get rid of inflectional and derivational affixes from words. In English, that usually means getting rid of the plural -s, progressive -ing, and preterite -ed. Depending on the type of stemmer, that [...]
Mendicant Bug Podcast
Posted: 12 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: blagoblag, blogging, odiogo, podcasts, speech synthesis
Thanks to Odiogo.com (via @johndcook), this blog now has a podcast powered by speech synthesis. Not having heard any decent speech synthesis for open domain text (maybe I’m behind the times here), I was pretty impressed with it. John had a post with a quote from The Agony and the Ecstasy and Odiogo got it [...]
Learning Scala
Posted: 11 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: books, friends, programming languages, ruby, scala, twitter
Two weeks ago, I picked up my copy of Programming in Scala, which had been languishing on my shelf for months. I pre-purchased it since I went to high school with one of the authors (Lex Spoon). His mother, incidentally, was also my favorite math teacher. When I started my new job back in September [...]
Netflix Prize just about wrapped up
Posted: 2 July 2009 in UncategorizedTags: clerk dogs, cmu, collaborative filtering, discovery engines, graduate school, hcir, human computer information retrieval, machine learning, movies, netflix, netflix prize, recommender systems, research
Image via CrunchBase It looks like some of the top players in the Netflix Prize competition have teamed up and finally broke the 10% improvement barrier. I know I’m a few days late on this, though not because I didn’t see when it happened. I’ve been battling an ear infection all week and it has [...]
