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  • Automatic acquisition of lexicon

    Automatic acquisition of lexicon

    Automatic acquisition of lexicon is a computerized process used for the development of a complex morphological lexicon of a language. The lexicon is essential for the NLP (Natural language processing), as well as a prerequisite to any wide-coverage parser. The two main requirements represent raw corpus and the morphological description of the language. The aim is to provide lemmas that will serve to the explanation of all the words that occur within the corpus. For the achievement of a quality lexicon it is necessary to manually validate the generated lemmas and iterate the whole process several times. The process is focused on the open word classes (e.g. nouns, adjectives, verbs). Closed classes (e.g. prepositions, pronouns, numerals) are excluded. This method is applicable to the languages with a rich morphology, such as Slovak, Russian or Croatian. Applied to Slovak, being an inflectional language, the automatic acquisition focuses on the inflectional morphology as well as on the derivational morphology. This fact enables the users to find out the information about derivational relations (e.g. adjectivizations, prefixes) in the lexicon. For example, Slovak word korpusový is an adjectivization of korpus (eng. corpus). == Three-step loop == Conformably to Benoît Sagot, there are three stages involved in the acquisition of lemmas: Generation and inflection Ranking Manual validation The more iteration will be performed, the more accurate lexicon will be obtained. For each iteration are essential the information given by a manual validator. === Generation and inflection === Firstly, all words which represent the closed word classes (pronouns, prepositions, numerals) are manually excluded from the given corpus. Number of their occurrences in the corpus is provided. Then the automatic generation comes, when the hypothetical lemmas according to the morphological description of a language are created. Generated lemmas are consequently being inflected, so that all of their inflected forms are built. Obtained forms are associated with the corresponding lemma and a morphological tag. === Ranking === There was created a probabilistic model, represented by a fix-point algorithm, to rank the hypothetical lemmas generated in the first step. Best ranked lemmas are expected to be ideally all correct, whereas the least ranked tend to be incorrect. === Manual validation === Correctness of the best- ranked lemmas created in the previous step are checked by the manual validator, who should be a native speaker. Lemmas are at this stage divided into three categories: valid lemmas, appended to lexicon erroneous lemmas generated by valid forms (later associated to another lemmas) erroneous lemmas generated by invalid forms (these need to be excluded) == Future development == Automatic acquisition, in comparison to a purely manual development of the lexicons, seems to be promising, considering the future development, because of the short validation time needed and the relatively small amount of human labor involved.

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  • Best AI Presentation Makers in 2026

    Best AI Presentation Makers in 2026

    In search of the best AI presentation maker? An AI presentation maker is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI presentation maker slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.

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  • Svetlana Lazebnik

    Svetlana Lazebnik

    Svetlana Lazebnik (born 1979) is a Ukrainian-American researcher in computer vision who works as a professor of computer science and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research involves interactions between image understanding and natural language processing, including the automated captioning of images, and the development of a benchmark database of textually grounded images. == Education and career == Lazebnik was born in Kyiv in 1979 to a family of Ukrainian Jews, and emigrated with her family to the US as a teenager. She majored in computer science at DePaul University, minoring in mathematics and graduating with the highest honors in 2000. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, with the dissertation Local, Semi-Local and Global Models for Texture, Object and Scene Recognition supervised by Jean Ponce. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois, she became an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She returned to the University of Illinois as a faculty member in 2012. She is a co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision. == Recognition == Lazebnik was named an IEEE Fellow in 2021, "for contributions to computer vision". With Cordelia Schmid and Jean Ponce, she won the Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2016 for the best work in computer vision from ten years earlier, for their work on spatial pyramid matching.

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  • Julia Hirschberg

    Julia Hirschberg

    Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She received her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan and the second from the University of Pennsylvania in computer science doing research in Natural Language Processing. She worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs from 1985 to 2002 and from 2002 at Columbia University where she is currently the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science. == Biography == Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg received her first Ph.D. degree in history (16th-century Mexico) from University of Michigan in 1976. She served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982. She subsequently shifted to Computer Science studies, receiving her M.S. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1985. Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system. She was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab. She and her department remained at Bell Labs until 1996 when they moved to AT&T Labs Research as part of a corporate reorganization. In 2002, she joined the Columbia University faculty as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She still leads classes at Columbia in speech and natural language research and supervises PhD students and a large number of research project students. == Research == Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, conversational implicature, text-to-speech synthesis, speech summarization, spoken dialogue systems, emotional speech, deceptive speech, charismatic speech, entrainment, empathetic speech and code-switching. Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems. With Janet Pierrehumbert, she developed a theoretical model of intonational meaning. She was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation. Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent (intonational prominent) items and the meaning of intonational contours. She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location, the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman, the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto, and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information, At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search and developing new interfaces for speech navigation. At Columbia, she and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems (automatically detecting speech recognition errors and inappropriate system queries, modeling turn-taking behavior, dialogue entrainment, modeling and generating clarification dialogues); on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. Corpora she and collaborators have collected include the Boston Directions Corpus, the Columbia SRI Colorado Deception Corpus, and the Columbia Games Corpus. She has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees. She has served as a member of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors and as co-chair of CRA-W. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. == Awards == Hirschberg's notable honors and awards include: Elected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences and recipient of the NAAI Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award, 2025 Elected as a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024. 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal Honorary Doctorate (eredoctoraat) from Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2018. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. IEEE Fellow, 2017 National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ACM Fellow in 2015 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2014. Honorary member, Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Founding) Fellow, 2011. International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2011. IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2011. Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktorer), KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, 2007. AAAI Fellow, 1994. == Publications == A social history of Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531-60, 1976 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases, 1991 Prosody and conversation, 1998 Most recent publications and other information, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/.

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  • 17LIVE

    17LIVE

    17LIVE is an international entertainment platform. As of 2024, 17LIVE is the #3 live broadcasting platform globally, formed by its flagship live stream app 17LIVE (LIVIT in English markets), MEME Live and live stream e-commerce platforms HandsUP and OrderPally. == History == 17LIVE was first founded in Taiwan in 2015 by Jeffery Huang. The company has maintained its leading position since its entry into the Japan market in 2017, becoming the biggest platform for live entertainment in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other countries. In 2017, 17 closed out US$33M in series B round to merge with dating software Paktor, with Joseph Phua (Co-founder of Paktor) taking over the leadership of 17LIVE as CEO and Co-founder, as well as to enter the Japan and Hong Kong market. Within one year, 17 Media became the #1 market leader in Japan. In 2018, the company raised $25M in series C round as it got ready for US IPO, which failed to materialize. 17LIVE had an unsuccessful US IPO attempt in 2018. Since then, the company reformed and transformed the business. Some key initiatives include the hiring of current CEO Hirofumi Ono, spin-off of Paktor (dating software business unit), full buy-out of founder Jeffery Huang, acquisition of MEME and HandsUp, and more. Despite the failed IPO attempt, the company continued to push for international expansion, including creating ‘LIVIT’ for the English-speaking markets to enter US, India, and North Africa. In 2019, 17's flagship live streaming app reached 10M downloads in Japan, and the business continues to push for both organic and inorganic expansion. Some key M&A highlights in the year include the acquisition of MEME Live in Southeast Asia, as well as HandsUp, a live e-commerce platform. In 2020, M17 closed out $26.5M in Series D round to continue organic growth in Japan, US and Middle East. In the same year, the company also sold its dating app business, Parktor, to rationalise M17 into a live-stream pure play business, followed by the appointment of its current Chairman, Joseph Phua, and previous Global CEO, Hirofumi Ono. With the buy-out and departure of founder Jeff Huang, the parent holding company M17 Entertainment Limited was officially renamed as 17 LIVE Group. An estimated 60 million users registered in 154 countries and territories in April 2022. In 2022, September, 17LIVE announced Group CEO Hirofumi Ono steps down. Alex Lien takes over the leadership as new Group COO; Jing Shen Ng appointed Group CTO. In 2023, March, 17LIVE announced Alex Lien promoted to Global CEO. Kenta Masuda appointed as Global CFO. === Collaboration with Ayumi Hamasaki === To celebrate its 4th anniversary, 17LIVE collaborated with Japanese singer-songwriter Ayumi Hamasaki, who led the 17LIVE 4th Anniversary meets Ayumi Hamasaki series starting October 18, 2021. Along with composer and arranger Yuta Nakano, Hamasaki judged auditioning artists competing for the chance to work with her and her production team for a debut single. The series was streamed live on the 17LIVE website, the final airing on November 11. The eventual winner was named as Yoshitaka_song. When asked why she collaborated with 17LIVE as a producer, Hamasaki commented: "Although the world has become like this (during COVID-19), I believe that the art of entertainment can give people dreams, hope, courage, and strength. I hope that kind of light will continue to shine through the entertainment industry." == Features == On 17LIVE, artists (LIVERs) are able to broadcast live, and post photos and videos from their album. The app has been designed for LIVERs to simply open the App, and start sharing contents without the need to edit or professionally curate their videos. The platform cultivates LIVERs, supports them with a local content management team, and provides artists with various functions, such as real time chatting, gifting, fan clubs, interactive competition and events. Today, 17LIVE has 46 thousands contracted artists and more than 2.3 million MAU, who spend 44 minutes on the platform every day. 17LIVE continues to advocate content-driven philosophy and delivers diverse topics, from politics and music to entertainment, to broaden its audience groups. 17LIVE also hosts offline flash events and concerts to attract new users and support LIVERs better connect with their fans. == Operation == 17LIVE has over 700 employees globally. The app provides few monetization models for LIVERs on the platform, including: Gifting: user / fans buy virtual gifts on the app to send to their favored LIVERs. Subscription: monthly subscription fan club service for access to exclusive content Pay-per-view: ticket service for online streaming concerts E-commerce: live e-commerce platform In the past, 17LIVE has encountered some regulatory headwinds with reported incidents of inappropriate livestream content on the platform. The incidents were direct results of the lack of oversight and supervision capability in place in the business at the time. Over the years, 17LIVE claims to have put in tremendous manpower and effort into improving, monitoring and maintaining control over both the live stream content and the KYC procedures and systems.

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  • OCR-B

    OCR-B

    OCR-B is a monospace font developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype by following the European Computer Manufacturer's Association standard. Its function was to facilitate the optical character recognition operations by specific electronic devices, originally for financial and bank-oriented uses. It was accepted as the world standard in 1973. It follows the ISO 1073-2:1976 (E) standard, refined in 1979 ("letterpress" design, size I). It includes all ASCII symbols, and other symbols needed in the bank environment. It is widely used for the human readable digits in UPC/EAN barcodes. It is also used for machine-readable passports. It shares that purpose with OCR-A, but it is easier for the human eye and brain to read and it has a less technical look than OCR-A. == History == In June 1961, the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) started standardization activities related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR). After evaluating existing OCR designs, it was decided to develop two new fonts: A stylized design with just digits, called “Class A”; and a more conventional type design with broader character coverage, called “Class B”. In February 1965, ECMA proposed a design for the “Class B” font to ISO, who adopted it as international standard ISO 1073-2 in October 1965. The first revision contained three font sizes: I, II and III. The specification included a Letterpress design, intended for high-quality printing equipment; and a rounded-edge Constant Strokewidth design for impact printers with reduced typographic quality. In September 1969, ECMA started work to revise its published standard. To make OCR-B more widely accepted, the shapes of some characters were slightly modified. The new revision removed font size II, which had been rarely used in practice; it deleted five character shapes; and it added a new font size IV. ECMA published the second edition of OCR-B in October 1971. In March 1976, ECMA published a third revision of its ECMA-11 specification. It added the symbols § and ¥ to OCR-B; two types of erasure marks (█) for blackening out mis-printed characters were added; and the length of the Vertical bar was changed to match ISO 1073-2. In 1993, Turkey proposed extending ISO 1073-2 to include the Turkish letters Ğğ, İı, and Şş. The request was generalized to extend OCR-B with a number of Latin and Greek letters used in European languages. A revision of the ISO 1073-2:1976 standard was therefore started, producing three successive draft documents. The final draft would have extended OCR-B with 40 Latin and 10 Greek letters; for six Latin letters, the draft gave new alternate shapes. A request to extend OCR-B with Vietnamese accents was rejected. Other than previous versions of the standard, which specified glyph shapes via reference drawings, the new revision would have included the shapes in machine-readable form. However, industry support for testing the new font could not be secured at the time, so the revision effort was halted in 1997. The working group described their findings in a technical report. In June 1998, the European Committee for Standardization published a report for adding the Euro sign to OCR-B. The report proposed both a single-stroked and a double-stroked variant of the Euro sign, leaving the decision to further testing of OCR performance. Testing was difficult: the theoretical design methods used when the OCR-B glyphs were originally developed could no longer be reproduced, and the technological constraints of the 1960s were also not entirely relevant anymore in the OCR environments of the 1990s. A new test method was devised, using present-time OCR technology. The tests found no difference in OCR performance between the two Euro variants, and recommended the adoption of the double-stroked variant as it matches the conventional glyph shape. The project did not have funds to thoroughly test the glyph extensions of the 1993 proposal; initial results were inconclusive. == Availability == Microsoft Office ships a version of Letterpress OCR-B produced by Monotype. It covers Windows-1252. Many vendors, including Adobe, still sell their versions of OCR-A and OCR-B. The TeX typesetting system has a public domain Constant Strokewidth OCR-B font in METAFONT definition form. It was created by Norbert Swartz in 1995 and updated in 2010. It has a setting for square stroke ends. The definition has also been translated to METATYPE1, so the rounded version is available in TrueType and OpenType too. A version of Constant Strokewidth OCR-B by Matthew Anderson has extended character coverage. It is available under CC-BY 4.0.

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  • Ofer Dekel (researcher)

    Ofer Dekel (researcher)

    Ofer Dekel (Hebrew: עופר דקל) is a computer science researcher in the Machine Learning Department of Microsoft Research. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an affiliate faculty at the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington. == Areas of research == Dekel's research topics include machine learning, online prediction, statistical learning theory, and stochastic optimization. He is currently engaged in the application of machine learning techniques in the development of the Bing search engine.

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  • GLIMMER

    GLIMMER

    In bioinformatics, GLIMMER (Gene Locator and Interpolated Markov ModelER) is used to find genes in prokaryotic DNA. "It is effective at finding genes in bacteria, archea, viruses, typically finding 98-99% of all relatively long protein coding genes". GLIMMER was the first system that used the interpolated Markov model to identify coding regions. The GLIMMER software is open source and is maintained by Steven Salzberg, Art Delcher, and their colleagues at the Center for Computational Biology at Johns Hopkins University. The original GLIMMER algorithms and software were designed by Art Delcher, Simon Kasif and Steven Salzberg and applied to bacterial genome annotation in collaboration with Owen White. == Versions == === GLIMMER 1.0 === First Version of GLIMMER "i.e., GLIMMER 1.0" was released in 1998 and it was published in the paper Microbial gene identification using interpolated Markov model. Markov models were used to identify microbial genes in GLIMMER 1.0. GLIMMER considers the local composition sequence dependencies which makes GLIMMER more flexible and more powerful when compared to fixed-order Markov model. There was a comparison made between interpolated Markov model used by GLIMMER and fifth order Markov model in the paper Microbial gene identification using interpolated Markov models. "GLIMMER algorithm found 1680 genes out of 1717 annotated genes in Haemophilus influenzae where fifth order Markov model found 1574 genes. GLIMMER found 209 additional genes which were not included in 1717 annotated genes where fifth order Markov model found 104 genes."' === GLIMMER 2.0 === Second Version of GLIMMER i.e., GLIMMER 2.0 was released in 1999 and it was published in the paper Improved microbial identification with GLIMMER. This paper provides significant technical improvements such as using interpolated context model instead of interpolated Markov model and resolving overlapping genes which improves the accuracy of GLIMMER. Interpolated context models are used instead of interpolated Markov model which gives the flexibility to select any base. In interpolated Markov model probability distribution of a base is determined from the immediate preceding bases. If the immediate preceding base is irrelevant amino acid translation, interpolated Markov model still considers the preceding base to determine the probability of given base where as interpolated context model which was used in GLIMMER 2.0 can ignore irrelevant bases. False positive predictions were increased in GLIMMER 2.0 to reduce the number of false negative predictions. Overlapped genes are also resolved in GLIMMER 2.0. Various comparisons between GLIMMER 1.0 and GLIMMER 2.0 were made in the paper Improved microbial identification with GLIMMER which shows improvement in the later version. "Sensitivity of GLIMMER 1.0 ranges from 98.4 to 99.7% with an average of 99.1% where as GLIMMER 2.0 has a sensitivity range from 98.6 to 99.8% with an average of 99.3%. GLIMMER 2.0 is very effective in finding genes of high density. The parasite Trypanosoma brucei, responsible for causing African sleeping sickness is being identified by GLIMMER 2.0" === GLIMMER 3.0 === Third version of GLIMMER, "GLIMMER 3.0" was released in 2007 and it was published in the paper Identifying bacterial genes and endosymbiont DNA with Glimmer. This paper describes several major changes made to the GLIMMER system including improved methods to identify coding regions and start codon. Scoring of ORF in GLIMMER 3.0 is done in reverse order i.e., starting from stop codon and moves back towards the start codon. Reverse scanning helps in identifying the coding portion of the gene more accurately which is contained in the context window of IMM. GLIMMER 3.0 also improves the generated training set data by comparing the long-ORF with universal amino acid distribution of widely disparate bacterial genomes."GLIMMER 3.0 has an average long-ORF output of 57% for various organisms where as GLIMMER 2.0 has an average long-ORF output of 39%." GLIMMER 3.0 reduces the rate of false positive predictions which were increased in GLIMMER 2.0 to reduce the number of false negative predictions. "GLIMMER 3.0 has a start-site prediction accuracy of 99.5% for 3'5' matches where as GLIMMER 2.0 has 99.1% for 3'5' matches. GLIMMER 3.0 uses a new algorithm for scanning coding regions, a new start site detection module, and architecture which integrates all gene predictions across an entire genome." Minimum description length === Theoretical and Biological Foundation === The GLIMMER project helped introduce and popularize the use of variable length models in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics that subsequently have been applied to numerous problems such as protein classification and others. Variable length modeling was originally pioneered by information theorists and subsequently ingeniously applied and popularized in data compression (e.g. Ziv-Lempel compression). Prediction and compression are intimately linked using Minimum Description Length Principles. The basic idea is to create a dictionary of frequent words (motifs in biological sequences). The intuition is that the frequently occurring motifs are likely to be most predictive and informative. In GLIMMER the interpolated model is a mixture model of the probabilities of these relatively common motifs. Similarly to the development of HMMs in Computational Biology, the authors of GLIMMER were conceptually influenced by the previous application of another variant of interpolated Markov models to speech recognition by researchers such as Fred Jelinek (IBM) and Eric Ristad (Princeton). The learning algorithm in GLIMMER is different from these earlier approaches. == Access == GLIMMER can be downloaded from The Glimmer home page (requires a C++ compiler). Alternatively, an online version is hosted by NCBI [1]. == How it works == GLIMMER primarily searches for long-ORFS. An open reading frame might overlap with any other open reading frame which will be resolved using the technique described in the sub section. Using these long-ORFS and following certain amino acid distribution GLIMMER generates training set data. Using these training data, GLIMMER trains all the six Markov models of coding DNA from zero to eight order and also train the model for noncoding DNA GLIMMER tries to calculate the probabilities from the data. Based on the number of observations, GLIMMER determines whether to use fixed order Markov model or interpolated Markov model. If the number of observations are greater than 400, GLIMMER uses fixed order Markov model to obtain there probabilities. If the number of observations are less than 400, GLIMMER uses interpolated Markov model which is briefly explained in the next sub section. GLIMMER obtains score for every long-ORF generated using all the six coding DNA models and also using non-coding DNA model. If the score obtained in the previous step is greater than a certain threshold then GLIMMER predicts it to be a gene. The steps explained above describes the basic functionality of GLIMMER. There are various improvements made to GLIMMER and some of them are described in the following sub-sections. === The GLIMMER system === GLIMMER system consists of two programs. First program called build-imm, which takes an input set of sequences and outputs the interpolated Markov model as follows. The probability for each base i.e., A,C,G,T for all k-mers for 0 ≤ k ≤ 8 is computed. Then, for each k-mer, GLIMMER computes weight. New sequence probability is computed as follows. where n is the length of the sequence S x {\displaystyle S_{x}} is the oligomer at position x. I M M 8 ( S x ) {\displaystyle IMM_{8}(S_{x})} , the 8 t h {\displaystyle 8^{th}} -order interpolated Markov model score is computed as "where Y k ( S x − 1 ) {\displaystyle Y_{k}(S_{x-1})} is the weight of the k-mer at position x-1 in the sequence S and P k ( S x ) {\displaystyle P_{k}(S_{x})} is the estimate obtained from the training data of the probability of the base located at position x in the k t h {\displaystyle k^{th}} -order model." The probability of base S x {\displaystyle S_{x}} given the i previous bases is computed as follows. "The value of Y i ( S x ) {\displaystyle Y_{i}(S_{x})} associated with P i ( S x ) {\displaystyle P_{i}(S_{x})} can be regarded as a measure of confidence in the accuracy of this value as an estimate of the true probability. GLIMMER uses two criteria to determine Y i ( S x ) {\displaystyle Y_{i}(S_{x})} . The first of these is simple frequency occurrence in which the number of occurrences of context string S x , i {\displaystyle S_{x,i}} in the training data exceeds a specific threshold value, then Y i ( S x ) {\displaystyle Y_{i}(S_{x})} is set to 1.0. The current default value for threshold is 400, which gives 95% confidence. When there are insufficient sample occurrences of a context string, build-imm employ additional criteria to determine Y {\displaystyle Y} value. For a

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  • Unspent transaction output

    Unspent transaction output

    In cryptocurrencies, an unspent transaction output (UTXO, often capitalized as UTxO) is a distinctive element in a subset of digital currency models. A UTXO represents a certain amount of cryptocurrency that has been authorized by a sender and is available to be spent by a recipient. The utilization of UTXOs in transaction processes is a key feature of many cryptocurrencies, but it primarily characterizes those implementing the UTXO model. UTXOs employ public key cryptography to ascertain and transfer ownership. More specifically, the recipient's public key is formatted into the UTXO, thereby limiting the capability to spend the UTXO to the account that can demonstrate ownership of the corresponding private key. A valid digital signature associated with the public key must be included for the UTXO to be spent. In the UTXO model, each unit of currency is treated as a discrete object. The history of a UTXO is documented only within the blocks where it is transferred. To ascertain the total balance of an account, one must scan each block to find the latest UTXOs linked to that account. While all nodes within a blockchain network must consent to the block history, the blocks relevant to an account's balance are unique to that account. UTXOs constitute a chain of ownership depicted as a series of digital signatures dating back to the coin's inception, regardless of whether the coin was minted via mining, staking, or another procedure determined by the cryptocurrency protocol. The UTXO model was invented for Bitcoin. Cardano uses an extended version of the UTXO model known as EUTXO. == Origins == The conceptual framework of the UTXO model can be traced back to Hal Finney's Reusable Proofs of Work proposal, which itself was based on Adam Back's 1997 Hashcash proposal. Bitcoin, released in 2009, was the first widespread implementation of the UTXO model in practice. == UTXO model vs. account Model == Cryptocurrencies that utilize the UTXO model function differently compared to those using the account model. In the UTXO model, individual units of cryptocurrency, termed as unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), are transferred between users, analogous to the exchange of physical cash. This model impacts how transactions and ownership are recorded and verified within the blockchain network. The account model preserves a record of each account and its corresponding balance for every block added to the network. This setup enables quicker balance verification without the need to scan historical blocks, but it increases the raw size of each block (though data compression techniques can be utilized to alleviate this). However, both models necessitate the inspection of past blocks to fully authenticate the origin of coins. In the UTXO model, each object is immutable - units of coins cannot be 'edited' in the same way an account balance is modified when a transaction occurs. Rather, the balance is computed from the transaction history dating back to when the coins were first minted. This simplicity enhances security, as a UTXO either exists in its anticipated form or it does not. In contrast, the account model requires meticulous verification of the account's status during transactions, which can lead to oversights if not conducted correctly. In valid blockchain transactions, only unspent outputs (UTXOs) are permissible for funding subsequent transactions. This requirement is critical to prevent double-spending and fraud. Accordingly, inputs in a transaction are removed from the UTXO set, while outputs create new UTXOs that are added to the set. The holders of private keys, such as those with cryptocurrency wallets, can utilize these UTXOs for future transactions.

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  • The Best Free AI Art Generator for Beginners

    The Best Free AI Art Generator for Beginners

    Trying to pick the best AI art generator? An AI art generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI art generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.

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  • Mealy machine

    Mealy machine

    In the theory of computation, a Mealy machine is a finite-state machine whose output values are determined both by its current state and the current inputs. This is in contrast to a Moore machine, whose output values are determined solely by its current state. A Mealy machine is a deterministic finite-state transducer: for each state and input, at most one transition is possible. == History == The Mealy machine is named after George H. Mealy, who presented the concept in a 1955 paper, "A Method for Synthesizing Sequential Circuits". == Formal definition == A Mealy machine is a 6-tuple ( S , S 0 , Σ , Λ , T , G ) {\displaystyle (S,S_{0},\Sigma ,\Lambda ,T,G)} consisting of the following: a finite set of states S {\displaystyle S} a start state (also called initial state) S 0 {\displaystyle S_{0}} which is an element of S {\displaystyle S} a finite set called the input alphabet Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } a finite set called the output alphabet Λ {\displaystyle \Lambda } a transition function T : S × Σ → S {\displaystyle T:S\times \Sigma \rightarrow S} mapping pairs of a state and an input symbol to the corresponding next state. an output function G : S × Σ → Λ {\displaystyle G:S\times \Sigma \rightarrow \Lambda } mapping pairs of a state and an input symbol to the corresponding output symbol. In some formulations, the transition and output functions are coalesced into a single function T : S × Σ → S × Λ {\displaystyle T:S\times \Sigma \rightarrow S\times \Lambda } . "Evolution across time" is realized in this abstraction by having the state machine consult the time-changing input symbol at discrete "timer ticks" t 0 , t 1 , t 2 , . . . {\displaystyle t_{0},t_{1},t_{2},...} and react according to its internal configuration at those idealized instants, or else having the state machine wait for a next input symbol (as on a FIFO) and react whenever it arrives. == Comparison of Mealy machines and Moore machines == Mealy machines tend to have fewer states: Different outputs on arcs (n2) rather than states (n). When implemented as electronic circuits (rather than as mathematical abstractions or code): Moore machines are safer to use than Mealy machines: Outputs change at the clock edge (always one cycle later). In Mealy machines, input change can cause output change as soon as logic is done — a big problem when two machines are interconnected – asynchronous feedback may occur if one isn't careful. Mealy machines react faster to inputs: React in the same cycle—they don't need to wait for the clock. In Moore machines, more logic may be necessary to decode state into outputs—more gate delays after clock edge. == Diagram == The state diagram for a Mealy machine associates an output value with each transition edge, in contrast to the state diagram for a Moore machine, which associates an output value with each state. When the input and output alphabet are both Σ, one can also associate to a Mealy automata a Helix directed graph (S × Σ, (x, i) → (T(x, i), G(x, i))). This graph has as vertices the couples of state and letters, each node is of out-degree one, and the successor of (x, i) is the next state of the automata and the letter that the automata output when it is instate x and it reads letter i. This graph is a union of disjoint cycles if the automaton is bireversible. == Examples == === Simple === A simple Mealy machine has one input and one output. Each transition edge is labeled with the value of the input (shown in red) and the value of the output (shown in blue). The machine starts in state Si. (In this example, the output is the exclusive-or of the two most-recent input values; thus, the machine implements an edge detector, outputting a 1 every time the input flips and a 0 otherwise.) === Complex === More complex Mealy machines can have multiple inputs as well as multiple outputs. == Applications == Mealy machines provide a rudimentary mathematical model for cipher machines. Considering the input and output alphabet the Latin alphabet, for example, then a Mealy machine can be designed that given a string of letters (a sequence of inputs) can process it into a ciphered string (a sequence of outputs). However, although a Mealy model could be used to describe the Enigma, the state diagram would be too complex to provide feasible means of designing complex ciphering machines. Moore/Mealy machines are DFAs that have also output at any tick of the clock. Modern CPUs, computers, cell phones, digital clocks and basic electronic devices/machines have some kind of finite state machine to control it. Simple software systems, particularly ones that can be represented using regular expressions, can be modeled as finite state machines. There are many such simple systems, such as vending machines or basic electronics. By finding the intersection of two finite state machines, one can design in a very simple manner concurrent systems that exchange messages for instance. For example, a traffic light is a system that consists of multiple subsystems, such as the different traffic lights, that work concurrently.

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    Node2vec

    node2vec is an algorithm to generate vector representations of nodes on a graph. The node2vec framework learns low-dimensional representations for nodes in a graph through the use of random walks through a graph starting at a target node. It is useful for a variety of machine learning applications. node2vec follows the intuition that random walks through a graph can be treated like sentences in a corpus. Each node in a graph is treated like an individual word, and a random walk is treated as a sentence. By feeding these "sentences" into a skip-gram, or by using the continuous bag of words model, paths found by random walks can be treated as sentences, and traditional data-mining techniques for documents can be used. The algorithm generalizes prior work which is based on rigid notions of network neighborhoods, and argues that the added flexibility in exploring neighborhoods is the key to learning richer representations of nodes in graphs. The algorithm is considered one of the best graph classifiers.

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    Grokking (machine learning)

    In machine learning, grokking, or delayed generalization, is a phenomenon observed in some settings where a model abruptly transitions from overfitting (performing well only on training data) to generalizing (performing well on both training and test data), after many training iterations with little or no improvement on the held-out data. This contrasts with what is typically observed in machine learning, where generalization occurs gradually alongside improved performance on training data. == Origin == Grokking was introduced by OpenAI researcher Alethea Power and colleagues in the January 2022 paper "Grokking: Generalization Beyond Overfitting on Small Algorithmic Datasets". It is derived from the word grok coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In ML research, "grokking" is not used as a synonym for "generalization"; rather, it names a sometimes-observed delayed‑generalization training phenomenon in which training and held‑out performance do not improve in tandem, and in which held‑out performance rises abruptly later. Authors also analyze the "grokking time", the epoch or step at which this transition occurs in those scenarios. == Interpretations == Grokking can be understood as a phase transition during the training process. In particular, recent work has shown that grokking may be due to a complexity phase transition in the model during training. While grokking has been thought of as largely a phenomenon of relatively shallow models, grokking has been observed in deep neural networks and non-neural models and is the subject of active research. One potential explanation is that the weight decay (a component of the loss function that penalizes higher values of the neural network parameters, also called regularization) slightly favors the general solution that involves lower weight values, but that is also harder to find. According to Neel Nanda, the process of learning the general solution may be gradual, even though the transition to the general solution occurs more suddenly later. Recent theories have hypothesized that grokking occurs when neural networks transition from a "lazy training" regime where the weights do not deviate far from initialization, to a "rich" regime where weights abruptly begin to move in task-relevant directions. Follow-up empirical and theoretical work has accumulated evidence in support of this perspective, and it offers a unifying view of earlier work as the transition from lazy to rich training dynamics is known to arise from properties of adaptive optimizers, weight decay, initial parameter weight norm, and more. This perspective is complementary to a unifying "pattern learning speeds" framework that links grokking and double descent; within this view, delayed generalization can arise across training time ("epoch‑wise") or across model size ("model‑wise"), and the authors report "model‑wise grokking".

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    Language Weaver

    Language Weaver is the machine translation (MT) technology and brand of RWS. The brand name was revived in 2021 following the acquisition of SDL and Iconic Translation Machines Ltd. and the merging of the respective teams and technologies. Language Weaver was formerly a standalone company that was acquired by SDL in 2010. == History == Language Weaver was a Los Angeles, California–based company founded in 2002 as a spin-out company from the University of Southern California. The company was founded to commercialise a statistical approach to automatic language translation and natural language processing known as statistical machine translation (SMT). The company's name is a reference to one of the pioneers of machine translation — Warren Weaver — who first proposed the idea of using computers to ‘decode’ or ‘decrypt’ language in a memorandum back in 1947. Language Weaver’s statistical approach to machine translation was cutting-edge at the time, and a significant improvement over previous approaches such as Rule-Based MT. Language Weaver grew steadily over an 8 year period, with staff numbers totalling 96 across offices in US, Europe, and Japan. The company had significant business with Government organisations where its name continues to hold strong recognition to this day. In July 2010, Language Weaver was acquired by SDL plc for $42.5 million and the company was renamed SDL Language Weaver. == SDL Language Weaver == SDL Language Weaver was the primary machine translation technology at SDL where, over time, it evolved from SMT to syntax-based MT, to Neural Machine Translation. The Language Weaver brand was retired in 2015 in favour of SDL BeGlobal for the cloud-based solution, and SDL Enterprise Translation Server for the on-premise solution. Later, these products were rebranded again as SDL Machine Translation Cloud and SDL Machine Translation Edge respectively. == 2021 Relaunch == The Language Weaver brand was revived in 2021 following the acquisition of SDL by RWS, and the merger of the SDL MT and Iconic Translation Machines teams and technologies. The combined technologies of both companies, based on state-of-the-art Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation, are now sold as "Language Weaver" for cloud-based MT, and "Language Weaver Edge" for on-premise MT. == Supported languages == As of September 2021, Language Weaver supports the following languages and language varieties:

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    AI Content Generators Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026

    In search of the best AI content generator? An AI content generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI content generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.

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