Allowing computers to understand language: Part 2 – Word embeddings

AI, History of Computing, NLP / February 6, 2022
word embeddings

This is a second post in the series on Natural Language Processing – “How computers understand language?”. The previous post provided an overview of the initial attempts to analyse texts using computers and introduced such foundational concepts as text tokenization and vectorisation. In this post I present a technique called word embeddings which allows you …

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Allowing computers to understand language: Part 1 – NLP with sparse text vectors

AI, NLP / December 31, 2021
MLP

This entry kicks off a series of posts about natural language processing (NLP), its history and how we have arrived at modern neural-network-powered natural language understanding (NLU). In this post I will talk about one commonly used and historically significant NLP technique used in a variety of tasks: text classification, document clustering and machine translation …

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What are the neural networks?

Big Data / November 7, 2021
Neural Networks

Since about 2012 a hype has been slowly building up around artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence has made some tangible advances and AI solutions have become more commonplace. These successes and the surrounding hype was enabled by a family of algorithms called Artificial Neural Networks, which quickly became the most commonly used machine learning algorithms …

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History of Computer Memory

History of Computing / September 30, 2021
DLM

This post is dedicated to the history of computer memory (RAM). Personally, I find this one of the most interesting elements of the computer and one which has undergone the most transformation from its origins to today. In my first post [what is a computer] I noted that it is precisely  memory that separates computers …

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Computing in the Soviet Union

History of Computing / September 30, 2021
ES-EVM

Soviet calculator “Vilnius”; image 7md.lt Soviets managed to go head-to-head with the US in terms of nuclear weapon development. They also managed to stay ahead of the US in terms of rocketry and to hold their own in the space-race. However, on the technological frontier of computing they have fallen horrendously behind. Why was that …

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What is a computer?

History of Computing / September 30, 2021
ENIAC

What’s a better place to start a blog about data and computers than with a core question – what is a computer, anyway? Is it just a really fancy calculator or is there something more to it? It turns out that defining a computer and separating them from other similar devices like sequence-controlled calculators or …

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