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Welcome!

I intend to use this blog as a place to discuss my work (or fun) in progress. I will sometimes digress into observations about language as well — I am a recidivist linguist after all.


DifRe Galleries

#DifReImage

I have been exploring different styles of images that my DifRe program can make. It is not limited to grotesque selfies (though those are fun!), but it can make all kinds of things. I've made some galleries grouped by style of things I've done: #DifreImage Galleries.

Of course, you can use a #DifreImage as the starting point for something even bigger, as artist Kathy Petrillo has. Take a look at lots of her work on her Facebook.

DifRe

#DifReImage

I have made a fun little image manipulation page:DifRe. See the manipulation from your phone/tablet camera live and save the result. All on your device — no tracking, of course.

Read more…

Frequency effects in large word embeddings

Continuing my explorations of frequency effects in word embeddings, I have a another short series in which I provide some summary tests for the frequency effects, and then show those tests in action, especially on large pre-trained word embeddings: Google News, GLoVe, and FastText.

There are still lots of questions to explore. Next up: I intend to address the question of whether these frequency effects make a difference? In other words, would reducing the effects improve the quality of the embeddings?

The Language of Oz

The Language of Oz

Last time I looked at the language of colors, and of course it's hard to think about colors without thinking about rainbows, and it's hard to think about rainbows without thinking abou the song "Over the Rainbow" and it's hard to think about the song without thinking about the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz.

However, even though the movie is a classic, I've never read the books on which it is based. It turns out that L. Frank Baum wrote 14(!) books in the Oz series, plus a bunch of other things connected to the Land of Oz. Not surprisingly, the MGM movie is a bit different from the books — example, Dorothy has silver shoes, not ruby slippers.

Just for fun, I've created a page that lets you explore the language of the Oz books for yourself. (You can open it separately, if you want.) While I won't claim to be a wizard, I hope you will find it wonderful.

P.S.
While Judy Garland sang the original version of "Over the Rainbow" (she was only 16!), I think this version by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole is even better — one of the relatively few cases where a later interpretation is better than the "classic" one.