Recently, Jean-Philippe Magué advised me of the newly introduced text stats on Amazon. A good summary by Gabe Habash on the news blog of Publishers Weekly describes the perspectives and the potential interest of this new software : Book Lies: Readability is Impossible to Measure. The stats seem to have been available since last summer. I decided to contribute to the discussion on Amazon’s text readability statistics : to what extent are they reliable and useful ?

Discussion

Gabe Habash compares several well-known books and concludes that the sentence length is determining in the readability measures used by Amazon. In fact, the …

I am working on the part-of-speech-tagging of the German political speeches corpus, and I would like to get tags from two different kinds of POS-taggers :

• on one hand the TreeTagger, a hidden Markov model tagger which uses statistical rules and decision trees,
• on the other the Stanford POS-Tagger, a bidirectional maximum entropy tagger.

This is easier said than done.

I am using the 2011-05-18 version of the Stanford Tagger with its standard models for German (I don’t know if any of the problems I encountered would be different with a newer or still-to-come version) and the basic …

This morning I was looking for a way to delete the dispensable aux, bbl, blg, log, out and toc files that a pdflatex compilation generates. I wanted it to go through directories so that it would eventually find old files and delete them too. I also wanted to do it from the command-line interface and to integrate it within a bash script.

As I didn’t find this bash snippet as such, i.e. adapted to the LaTeX-generated files, I post it here:

find . -regex ".*\(aux\|bbl\|blg\|log\|nav\|out\|snm\|toc\)$" -exec rm -i {} \;

This works on Unix …

Here are a few links about interesting things that I recently read.

• An article co-authored by Daniel Lemire about cleaning Project Gutenberg e-Books (i.e. removing preambles and epilogues) using a statistical (and not a rule-based) approach.

  Removing Manually-Generated Boilerplate from Electronic Texts: Experiments with Project Gutenberg e-Books by Owen Kaser and Daniel Lemire

• An article about XML compression techniques which details several alternatives, including “XML conscious compressors”, i.e. compressors which enable queries.

  Investigate state-of-the-art XML compression techniques by Sherif Sakr

• A few SSH tricks, most notably the “Operating on Remote Files Locally” which explains how to use SSHFS …

Last week, I improved the CSS file that displays the (mostly long) texts of the German Political Speeches Corpus, which I introduced in my last post (“Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool”). The texts should be easier to read now (though I do not study this kind of readability), you can see an example here (BP text 536).

I looked for ideas to design a clean and simple layout, but I did not find what I needed. So I will outline in this post the main features of my new CSS file:

• First of all, margins, font-size …

I am currently working on a resource I would like to introduce : the German Political Speeches Corpus (no acronym apart from GPS). It consists in speeches by the last German Presidents and Chancellors as well as a few ministers, all gathered from official sources.

As far I as know no such corpus was publicly available for German. Most speeches could not be found on Google until today (which is bound to change). It can be freely republished.

The two main corpora (Presidency and Chancellery) are released in XML format basing on raw text and metadata.

There is a series of …

Jean-Philippe Magué told me there was a Google advanced search filter that checked the result pages to give a readability estimate. In fact, it was introduced about seven months ago and works to my knowledge only for the English language (that’s also why I didn’t notice it).

Description

For more information, you can read the official help page. I also found two convincing blog posts showing how it works, one by the Unofficial Google System Blog and the other by Daniel M. Russell.

The most interesting bits of information I was able to find consist in a brief …

As I had to make a poster for the TALN 2011 conference to illustrate my short paper (PDF, in French), I decided to use LaTeX, even if it was not the easiest way. I am quite happy with the result (PDF).

I gathered a few links that helped me out. My impression is that there are two common models, and as I matter of fact I saw both of them at the conference. The one that I used, Beamerposter, was “made in Germany” by Philippe Dreuw, from the Informatics Department of the University of Aachen. I only had to adapt …

Lord Kelvin

Here is what William Thompson, better known as Lord Kelvin, once said about measure:

« I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be. »
William Thompson, Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement” (3 May 1883)

Bachelard

I found …

Basing on my previous post about specialized crawlers, I will show how I to crawl a French sports newspaper named L’Equipe using scripts written in Perl, which I did lately. For educational purpose, it works by now but it is bound to stop being efficient as soon as the design of the website changes.

Gathering links

First of all, you have to make a list of links so that you have something to start from. Here is the beginning of the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl #assuming you're using a UNIX-based system...
use strict; #because it gets messy without …