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 …

As I try to put my notes in order by the end of this year, I changed a series of references, most notably in the bibliography and in the links sections.

Bibliography

I just updated the bibliography, using new categories. I divided the references in two main sections:

Corpus Linguistics, Complexity and Readability Assessment

• Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Building
• Complexity and Linguistic Complexity Theory
• Text Comprehension and Readability Theory
• Readability Formulas
• Readability Assessment

Background

• General Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Measurement Theory
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Technology
• Miscellaneous Tools
• Tagging and Marking

Links

First of all, I updated the links section …

In my previous post, I presented a few references. I went on reading books and articles on this topic, and I am now able to sort them in several kinds of approaches.

This is mostly thanks to these books in French on philosophy of technology:

• G. Simondon, L’invention dans les techniques : cours et conférences, Paris: Seuil, 2005.
• G. Hottois, Philosophies des sciences, philosophies des techniques, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004.
• J. Goffi, La philosophie de la technique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
• G. Hottois, Le signe et la technique : la philosophie à l’épreuve de la technique, Paris: Aubier, 1984 …

As I once studied philosophy (back in the classes préparatoires), I like to keep in touch with this kind of reflexion. Moreover, in this research field where everything is moving very fast, it is a way to find a few continuities and to ground the peculiar questions regarding the analysis of language in a more conceptual framework.

Here is a list of texts available on the Internet (some of them partly) that seem important to me. Some are written in English, some in French or in German, as I chose the original ones.

It does not have the pretension to …

I recently updated the blogroll section and I also would like to share a few links:

• a huge links selection on pattern matching: Pattern Matching Pointers
• the comp.text Frequently Asked Questions (Usenet archive)
• links on annotation (page in French, links in English) collected by Karën Fort (Paris 13)

As I will be teaching LaTeX soon the LaTeX links section of the blog has expanded.

Last but not least, here is an E-Book, Mining of Massive Datasets, by A. Rajaraman and J. D. Ullmann. It was made of classes taught at Stanford and is now free to use (available chapter …

Here is my selection of introductory courses given by well-known specialists in Computer Science or Natural Language Processing and recorded so that they can be followed at home.

1. Artificial Intelligence | Natural Language Processing, Christopher D. Manning, Stanford University.
More than 20 hours, 18 lectures.
Introduction to the key topics of NLP, summary of existing models.
Lecture 12 : Dan Jurafsky as a guest lecturer.
Requires the Silverlight plugin (no comment). Transcripts available.

2. Bits, Harry R. Lewis, Harvard University.
A general overview of information as quantity and quantitative methods.
Very comprehensive lecture (data theories, internet protocols, encryption, copyright issues, laws …

Talking about text complexity in my last post, I did not realize how important it is to take the framework of text linguistics into account. This branch of linguistics is well-known in Germany but is not really meant as a topic by itself elsewhere. Most of the time, no one makes a distinction between text linguistics and discourse analysis, although the background is not necessarily the same.

I saw a presentation by Jean-Michel Adam last week, who describes himself as the “last of the Mohicans” to use this framework in French research. He drew a comprehensive picture of its origin …

I have selected a few papers on readability published in the last years, all available online (for instance using a specialized search engine, see previous post):

1. First of all, I reviewed this one last week, it is a very up-to-date article. L. Feng, M. Jansche, M. Huenerfauth, and N. Elhadad, “A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment”, 2010, pp. 276-284.
2. The seminal paper to which Feng et al. often refers, as they combine several approaches, especially statistical language models, support vector machines and more traditional criteria. A comprehensive bibliography. S. E. Schwarm and M. Ostendorf, “Reading level assessment using …

I read an interesting article, “featuring” an up-to-date comparison of what is being done in the field of readability assessment:

“A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment”, Lijun Feng, Martin Jansche, Matt Huenerfauth, Noémie Elhadad, 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010), Poster Volume, pp. 276-284.

I am interested in the features they use. Let’s summarize, I am going to do a quick recension:

Corpus and tools

• Corpus: a sample from the Weekly Reader
• OpenNLP to extract named entities and resolve co-references
• the Weka learning toolkit for machine learning

Features

• Four subsets of discourse features:
1. entity-density …

To go a bit further than my previous post, here are a few references that I recently found to be interesting.

For a definition and/or other short bibliographies, see Wikipedia or something else this time : Scholarpedia, with an article “curated” by T.K. Landauer and S.T. Dumais.

U. Mortensen, Einführung in die Korrespondenzanalyse, Universität Münster,2009.

G. Gorrell and B. Webb, “Generalized Hebbian Algorithm for Incremental Latent Semantic Analysis,” in Ninth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 2005.

P. Cibois, Les méthodes d’analyse d’enquêtes, Que sais-je ?, 2004.

B. Pincombe, Comparison of Human and Latent Semantic …