Tonight I got to hear Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, and lover of excellent shirts, speak on natural language processing. Just for us Hackerschoolers! I have some notes to type up later, but I was super excited because he talked about techniques to take a bunch of text and recognize if it's valid English or not (or valid words, etc). So I really wanted to ask my question which was:
"When you're a child, and you're learning to read, if you see a word you don't understand, you can often infer from the context, what it might mean. Can we use these same techniques to do this computationally, for the case of words we've never encountered, or even new words, like slang?"
Which I thought was a good question but I thought people might think it was a childish question because a lot of the other questions were from people who had done research in that area. For me it's been relevant lately because I learn a lot of new slang, in French and in English (like "taper", in French means to work, and "that's what's up", means kind of "look, what a notable fact" ... but how do you know these things when you first encounter them?) He said that basically he didn't talk a lot about meaning in his talk, his talk was about "is this valid language?" vs "What does this mean?" and we don't know a lot about how to do that, and the techniques are still rudimentary, like doing graphs of what kinds of words constellate similarly.
Then someone asked him "What is your favorite problem?" (which is the best question ever, wouldn't you like to ask that to everyone you know?)
and he said that the one that I talked about, the problem about meaning, was his favorite problem!
So I was so proud of my question after all.
Reflecting on myself as a learner and thinker how Mel Chua encouraged us to do, I'd say I'm such an intuitive learner, I arrive very easily by great leaps of intuition to the heart of the matter, but I'm often quite bad at expressing myself with authority, so I find people often assume I'm a bit childish or not super intelligent unless I get to know them and think with them for a while. Also I tend to think and express myself a bit colloquially, which people tend to mark you down on intelligence for, but for me I quite like. I like Mary a lot because she speaks like that a bit as well "so now this guy, his value will be"...talking about variable, and for me I really understand well when she explains things that way.
I'm really glad I went to this talk even thought I got lost and there was no more pasta when I arrived! It was at TUMBLR! TUMBLR! I had no wifi or else I would have totally tumbled from tumblr.
