Let’s pretend you recently installed R (a software to do statistical computing), you have a text collection you would like to analyze or classify and some time to lose. Here are a few quick commands that could get you a little further. I also write this kind of cheat sheet in order to remember a set of useful tricks and packages I recently gathered and from which I thought they could help others too.

Letter frequencies

In this example I will use a series of characteristics (or features) extracted from a text collection, more precisely the frequency of each …

I would like to introduce an article resulting from a talk I recently held. I had the chance to speak at a conference for young researchers in philosophy held at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. The global frame was the criticism of ratio and rationalism during the 20th century. In order to illustrate such a criticism, I tackled the idea of blind reason in an article entitled ‘La Raison aveugle ? L’époque cybernétique et ses dispositifs‘, which I made available online (PDF file).

Brief summary

In a late interview, Martin Heidegger states that philosophy is bound to be replaced by cybernetics …

I would like to sum up a clear synthesis and state of the art of scientific traditions and ways to deal with language features as a whole. In a chapter entitled ‘Computational Models of Psycholinguistics’ and published in the Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics, Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen distinguish three main traditions in psycholinguistic language modeling :

• a symbolic (Chomskyan) tradition
• connectionnist psycholinguistics
• probabilistic models

They state that the Chomskyan approach (as well as nativist theories of language in general) outweighed until recently by far any other one, setting the ground for cognitive science :

“Chomsky’s arguments concerning the formal …

I am now part of the COW project (COrpora on the Web). The project has been carried by (amongst others) Roland Schäfer and Felix Bildhauer at the FU Berlin for about two years. Work has already been done, especially concerning long-haul crawls in several languages.

Resources

A few resources have already been made available, software, n-gram models as well as web-crawled corpora, which for copyright reasons are not downloadable as a whole. They may be accessed through a special interface (COLiBrI – COW’s Light Browsing Interface) or downloaded upon request in a scrambled form (all sentences randomly reordered).

This is …

In his professorial thesis (or habilitation thesis), which is about to be made public (the defence takes place next week), Ludovic Tanguy explains why and on what conditions data visualization could help linguists. In a previous post, I showed a few examples of visualization applied to the field of readability assessment. Tanguy’s questioning is more general, it has to do with what is to include in the disciplinary field of linguistics.

He gives a few reasons to use the methods from the emerging field of visual analytics and mentions some of its upholders (like Daniel Keim or Jean-Daniel Fekete …

Continuing a series of reviews on readability assessment, I would like to describe a tool which is close to what I intend to do. It is named DeLite and is named a ‘readability checker’. It has been developed at the IICS research center of the FernUniversität Hagen.

From my point of view, its main feature is that it has not been made publicly available, it is based on software one has to buy and I did not manage to find even a demo version, although they claim to have been publicly (i.e. EU-)funded. Thus, my description is based …

Introduction

I already described how to build a basic specialized crawler on this blog. I also wrote about crawling a newspaper website to build a corpus. As I went on work on this issue, I decided to release a few useful scripts under an open-source license.

The crawlers are not just mere link-harvesters, they are designed to be used as corpus-builders. As one cannot republish anything but quotations of the texts, the purpose is to enable others to make their own version of the corpora. Since the newspapers are updated quite often, it is not imaginable to create exact duplicates …

It is not only a matter of scale : the perspective one chooses is crucial when it comes to visualize how difficult a text is. Two main options can be taken into consideration:

• An overview in form of a summary which enables to compare a series of phenomena for the whole text.
• A visualization which takes the course of the text into account, as well as the possible evolution of parameters.

I already dealt with the first type of visualization on this blog when I evoked Amazon’s text stats. To sum up, their simplicity is also their main problem, they …

The field of “gerolinguistics” is becoming more and more important. The word was first coined by G. Cohen in 1979 and it has been regularly used ever since.

How do older people read ? How do they perform when trying to understand difficult sentences ? It was the idea I was following when I recently decided to read a few papers about linguistic abilities and aging. As I work on different reader profiles I thought it would be an interesting starting point.

The fact is that I did not find what I was looking for, but was not disappointed since the assumption …

I recently read that Microsoft was planning to analyze several social networks in order to know more about users, so that the search engine could deliver more appropriate results. See this article on geekwire.com : Microsoft idea: Analyze social networks posts to deduce mood, interests, education.

Among the variables that are considered, the ‘sophistication and education level’ of the posts is mentionned. This is highly interesting, because it assumes a double readability assessment, on the reader’s side and on the side of the search engine. More precisely, this could refer to a classification task.

Here is an extract of …