Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics?

[mcarthur]

We're working with an associational framework on English text. The psychology-based framework called HAL (Hyperspace Analogue to Language) creates associations between words (or concepts depending on who you talk to) in text. You can then do some fun dimension reduction techniques like LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or Concept Indexing or random projection. All of it is done in perl. We're not using PDL at the moment, but may do so in the future. If you're interested, our publications are here - look at the top for the ECSCW paper for the most recent one.

[allolex]

I myself am interested in semantic/knowledge extraction, association, and representation. I really like the idea of concept indexing and even though there is a practical side to all of this as well, I was thinking of the value of such research to large-scale socio-psychological research where accurate generalizations of individual behavior within a group take center stage.

We're working on collocation extraction for a French dictionary we are building. I plan on using part of our corpus for categorizing lexemes according to an ontology I plan to extract from a broader range of corpora--basically using pre-existing encyclopedic knowledge to build an ontology instead of creating the ontology beforehand. I plan to use XML topic maps to do this. (I'm not even vaguely close to an implementation.)

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Allolex