Sylvain Paillard

In echo to the ever-increasing popularity of the tag-clouds, the emerging domain of auto-tagging aims to be the solution to populate these attractive visual components without requiring to tag each page individually. While many approaches try to solve this challenge, most of them do not address the real underlying technical challenges. But in order to evaluate how tag-clouds can deliver their full potential, we have to analyze what is at stake for the end-users and understand why tag-cloud could make a real difference in the way to access information.

In this new domain where art can meet with technology, visualization with data mining and repetitive manual efforts with automation, I felt it was interesting to inspect the different components and their roles; and to figure out what is new and what is old, what is solved and what is not, what is possible and what is pure fantasy…

(more…)

Comments(0)

“We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.”
Haldeman, Harold Robbins

The semantic web is getting more and more attention, but although the W3C tries to set-up a well-defined standard, its deployment is so far as speculative as is the one of Web 3.0 in general.  On the other side, the search-engine industry increases regularly its ability to provide more comprehensive features going way beyond the simple projection of search keyword into an index of terms. While both sides tend to reach the same result (by restructuring the Internet versus by building a structure over raw data), these are not the two only possible approaches. Others try, for example,  to leverage a context out of the search queries and the navigation behavior to better identify the user intent and therefore provide him with more interesting results.

(more…)

Comments(0)

What forests would look like if they were context-free… (click here to see source)

In formal language theory, the concept of context-free is connected to the one of a formal language or grammar (CFG), which, in the scope of AI, is mainly used in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). I will discuss here how it can be considered as a major AI concept, but also how understanding its implications can be a helpful way to analyze the value of any AI algorithm.

(more…)

Comments(0)