AI Generator Quillbot

AI Generator Quillbot — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

• 

  Sample (graphics)

  In computer graphics, a sample is an intersection of a channel and a pixel. The diagram below depicts a 24-bit pixel, consisting of 3 samples for Red, Green, and Blue. In this particular diagram, the Red sample occupies 9 bits, the Green sample occupies 7 bits and the Blue sample occupies 8 bits, totaling 24 bits per pixel. Note that the samples do not have to be equal size and not all samples are mandatory in a pixel. Also, a pixel can consist of more than 3 samples (e.g. 4 samples of the RGBA color space). A sample is related to a subpixel on a physical display.

  Read more →
• 

  Collocation

  In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb. Collocation extraction is a computational technique that finds collocations in a document or corpus, using various computational linguistics elements resembling data mining. == Expanded definition == Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. Such terms as crystal clear, middle management, nuclear family, and cosmetic surgery are examples of collocated pairs of words. Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb–object: make and decision), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation a common focus for language teaching. Corpus linguists specify a key word in context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them, to illustrate the way words are used in practice. The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information, t scores, and log-likelihood. Rather than select a single definition, Gledhill proposes that collocation involves at least three different perspectives: co-occurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates; construction, which sees collocation either as a correlation between a lexeme and a lexical-grammatical pattern, or as a relation between a base and its collocative partners; and expression, a pragmatic view of collocation as a conventional unit of expression, regardless of form. These different perspectives contrast with the usual way of presenting collocation in phraseological studies. Traditionally speaking, collocation is explained in terms of all three perspectives at once, in a continuum: == In dictionaries == In 1933, Harold Palmer's Second Interim Report on English Collocations highlighted the importance of collocation as a key to producing natural-sounding language, for anyone learning a foreign language. Thus from the 1940s onwards, information about recurrent word combinations became a standard feature of monolingual learner's dictionaries. As these dictionaries became "less word-centred and more phrase-centred", more attention was paid to collocation. This trend was supported, from the beginning of the 21st century, by the availability of large text corpora and intelligent corpus-querying software, making it possible to provide a more systematic account of collocation in dictionaries. Using these tools, dictionaries such as the Macmillan English Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocations. There are also a number of specialized dictionaries devoted to describing the frequent collocations in a language. These include (for Spanish) Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español contemporaneo (2004), (for French) Le Robert: Dictionnaire des combinaisons de mots (2007), and (for English) the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997) and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010). == Statistically significant collocation == Student's t-test can be used to determine whether the occurrence of a collocation in a corpus is statistically significant. For a bigram w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle w_{1}w_{2}} , let P ( w 1 ) = # w 1 N {\displaystyle P(w_{1})={\frac {\#w_{1}}{N}}} be the unconditional probability of occurrence of w 1 {\displaystyle w_{1}} in a corpus with size N {\displaystyle N} , and let P ( w 2 ) = # w 2 N {\displaystyle P(w_{2})={\frac {\#w_{2}}{N}}} be the unconditional probability of occurrence of w 2 {\displaystyle w_{2}} in the corpus. The t-score for the bigram w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle w_{1}w_{2}} is calculated as: where x ¯ = # w i w j N {\displaystyle {\bar {x}}={\frac {\#w_{i}w_{j}}{N}}} is the sample mean of the occurrence of w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle w_{1}w_{2}} , # w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle \#w_{1}w_{2}} is the number of occurrences of w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle w_{1}w_{2}} , μ = P ( w i ) P ( w j ) {\displaystyle \mu =P(w_{i})P(w_{j})} is the probability of w 1 w 2 {\displaystyle w_{1}w_{2}} under the null-hypothesis that w 1 {\displaystyle w_{1}} and w 2 {\displaystyle w_{2}} appear independently in the text, and s 2 = x ¯ ( 1 − x ¯ ) ≈ x ¯ {\displaystyle s^{2}={\bar {x}}(1-{\bar {x}})\approx {\bar {x}}} is the sample variance. With a large N {\displaystyle N} , the t-test is equivalent to a Z-test.

  Read more →
• 

  Xu Li (computer scientist)

  Xu Li is a Chinese computer scientist and co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime, an artificial intelligence (AI) company. Xu has led SenseTime since the company's incorporation and helped it independently develop its proprietary deep learning platform. == Education and research == Xu obtained both his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his doctorate in computer science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Xu has published more than 50 papers at international conferences and in journals in the field of computer vision and won the Best Paper Award at the international conference on Non-Photorealistic Rendering and Animation (NPAR) 2012 and the Best Reviewer Award at the international conferences Asian Conference on Computer Vision ACCV 2012 and International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2015. He has three algorithms that have been included into the visual open-source platform OpenCV, and his "L0 Smoothing" algorithm garnered the most citations in research papers over a span of five years (2011–2015) within the ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), a scientific journal that Thomson Reuters InCites has placed first among software engineering journals. == Career == Previously, Xu worked at Lenovo Corporate Research & Development. He was also a visiting researcher at Motorola China R&D Institute, Omron Research Institute, and Microsoft Research. == Selected publications == Jimmy Ren, Xiaohao Chen, Jianbo Liu, Wenxiu Sun, Li Xu, Jiahao Pang, Qiong Yan, Yu-wing Tai, "Accurate Single Stage Detector Using Recurrent Rolling Convolution", (CVPR), 2017. Jimmy SJ. Ren, Yongtao Hu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chuan Wang, Li Xu, Wenxiu Sun, Qiong Yan, "Look, Listen and Learn – A Multimodal LSTM for Speaker Identification", The 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2016 Jimmy SJ. Ren, Li Xu, Qiong Yan, Wenxiu Sun, "Shepard Convolutional Neural Networks" Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2015. Xiaoyong Shen, Chao Zhou, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia, "Mutual-Structure for Joint Filtering" International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), (oral presentation), 2015. Jianping Shi, Qiong Yan, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia, "Hierarchical Image Saliency Detection on Extended CSSD" IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2015. Jianping Shi, Xin Tao, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia, "Break Ames Room Illusion: Depth from General Single Images" ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), (Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA2015). Yongtao Hu, Jimmy SJ. Ren, Jingwen Dai, Chang Yuan, Li Xu, Wenping Wang, "Deep Multimodal Speaker Naming" ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2015. Li Xu, Jimmy SJ. Ren, Qiong Yan, Renjie Liao, Jiaya Jia "Deep Edge-Aware Filters" International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2015. Jianping Shi, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia "Just Noticeable Defocus Blur Detection and Estimation" IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015. Ziyang Ma, Renjie Liao, Xin Tao, Li Xu, Jiaya Jia, Enhua Wu "Handling Motion Blur in Multi-Frame Super-Resolution" IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015. Xiaoyong Shen, Qiong Yan, Li Xu, Lizhuang Ma, Jiaya Jia"Multispectral Joint Image Restoration via Optimizing a Scale Map" IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2015. Jimmy SJ. Ren, Li Xu, "On Vectorization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Vision Tasks" AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2015. == Awards and honors == Xu was ranked 7th in Fortune magazine's 2018 edition of its 40 Under 40. He was also named "China's Outstanding AI Industry Leader" by The Economic Observer, received the "Innovative Business Leader" Award under NetEase's "Future Technology Talent Awards", and was honored as Sina's "2017 Top Ten Economic Figures". In 2018, Xu was named EY's "Entrepreneur of the Year China" in the Technology category.

  Read more →
• 

  Markov partition

  A Markov partition in mathematics is a tool used in dynamical systems theory, allowing the methods of symbolic dynamics to be applied to the study of hyperbolic dynamics. By using a Markov partition, the system can be made to resemble a discrete-time Markov process, with the long-term dynamical characteristics of the system represented as a Markov shift. The appellation 'Markov' is appropriate because the resulting dynamics of the system obeys the Markov property. The Markov partition thus allows standard techniques from symbolic dynamics to be applied, including the computation of expectation values, correlations, topological entropy, topological zeta functions, Fredholm determinants and the like. == Motivation == Let ( M , φ ) {\displaystyle (M,\varphi )} be a discrete dynamical system. A basic method of studying its dynamics is to find a symbolic representation: a faithful encoding of the points of M {\displaystyle M} by sequences of symbols such that the map φ {\displaystyle \varphi } becomes the shift map. Suppose that M {\displaystyle M} has been divided into a number of pieces E 1 , E 2 , … , E r {\displaystyle E_{1},E_{2},\ldots ,E_{r}} which are thought to be as small and localized, with virtually no overlaps. The behavior of a point x {\displaystyle x} under the iterates of φ {\displaystyle \varphi } can be tracked by recording, for each n {\displaystyle n} , the part E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} which contains φ n ( x ) {\displaystyle \varphi ^{n}(x)} . This results in an infinite sequence on the alphabet { 1 , 2 , … , r } {\displaystyle \{1,2,\ldots ,r\}} which encodes the point. In general, this encoding may be imprecise (the same sequence may represent many different points) and the set of sequences which arise in this way may be difficult to describe. Under certain conditions, which are made explicit in the rigorous definition of a Markov partition, the assignment of the sequence to a point of M {\displaystyle M} becomes an almost one-to-one map whose image is a symbolic dynamical system of a special kind called a shift of finite type. In this case, the symbolic representation is a powerful tool for investigating the properties of the dynamical system ( M , φ ) {\displaystyle (M,\varphi )} . == Formal definition == A Markov partition is a finite cover of the invariant set of the manifold by a set of curvilinear rectangles { E 1 , E 2 , … , E r } {\displaystyle \{E_{1},E_{2},\ldots ,E_{r}\}} such that For any pair of points x , y ∈ E i {\displaystyle x,y\in E_{i}} , that W s ( x ) ∩ W u ( y ) ∈ E i {\displaystyle W_{s}(x)\cap W_{u}(y)\in E_{i}} Int ⁡ E i ∩ Int ⁡ E j = ∅ {\displaystyle \operatorname {Int} E_{i}\cap \operatorname {Int} E_{j}=\emptyset } for i ≠ j {\displaystyle i\neq j} If x ∈ Int ⁡ E i {\displaystyle x\in \operatorname {Int} E_{i}} and φ ( x ) ∈ Int ⁡ E j {\displaystyle \varphi (x)\in \operatorname {Int} E_{j}} , then φ [ W u ( x ) ∩ E i ] ⊃ W u ( φ x ) ∩ E j {\displaystyle \varphi \left[W_{u}(x)\cap E_{i}\right]\supset W_{u}(\varphi x)\cap E_{j}} φ [ W s ( x ) ∩ E i ] ⊂ W s ( φ x ) ∩ E j {\displaystyle \varphi \left[W_{s}(x)\cap E_{i}\right]\subset W_{s}(\varphi x)\cap E_{j}} Here, W u ( x ) {\displaystyle W_{u}(x)} and W s ( x ) {\displaystyle W_{s}(x)} are the unstable and stable manifolds of x, respectively, and Int ⁡ E i {\displaystyle \operatorname {Int} E_{i}} simply denotes the interior of E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} . These last two conditions can be understood as a statement of the Markov property for the symbolic dynamics; that is, the movement of a trajectory from one open cover to the next is determined only by the most recent cover, and not the history of the system. It is this property of the covering that merits the 'Markov' appellation. The resulting dynamics is that of a Markov shift; that this is indeed the case is due to theorems by Yakov Sinai (1968) and Rufus Bowen (1975), thus putting symbolic dynamics on a firm footing. Variants of the definition are found, corresponding to conditions on the geometry of the pieces E i {\displaystyle E_{i}} . == Examples == Markov partitions have been constructed in several situations. Anosov diffeomorphisms of the torus. Dynamical billiards, in which case the covering is countable. Markov partitions make homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits particularly easy to describe. The system ( [ 0 , 1 ) , x ↦ 2 x m o d 1 ) {\displaystyle ([0,1),x\mapsto 2x\ mod\ 1)} has the Markov partition E 0 = ( 0 , 1 / 2 ) , E 1 = ( 1 / 2 , 1 ) {\displaystyle E_{0}=(0,1/2),E_{1}=(1/2,1)} , and in this case the symbolic representation of a real number in [ 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle [0,1)} is its binary expansion. For example: x ∈ E 0 , T x ∈ E 1 , T 2 x ∈ E 1 , T 3 x ∈ E 1 , T 4 x ∈ E 0 ⇒ x = ( 0.01110... ) 2 {\displaystyle x\in E_{0},Tx\in E_{1},T^{2}x\in E_{1},T^{3}x\in E_{1},T^{4}x\in E_{0}\Rightarrow x=(0.01110...)_{2}} . The assignment of points of [ 0 , 1 ) {\displaystyle [0,1)} to their sequences in the Markov partition is well defined except on the dyadic rationals - morally speaking, this is because ( 0.01111 … ) 2 = ( 0.10000 … ) 2 {\displaystyle (0.01111\dots )_{2}=(0.10000\dots )_{2}} , in the same way as 1 = 0.999 … {\displaystyle 1=0.999\dots } in decimal expansions.

  Read more →
• 

  ACL Data Collection Initiative

  The ACL Data Collection Initiative (ACL/DCI) was a project established in 1989 by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) to create and distribute large text and speech corpora for computational linguistics research. The initiative aimed to address the growing need for substantial text databases that could support research in areas such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computational linguistics. By 1993, the initiative’s activities had effectively ceased, with its functions and datasets absorbed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), which was founded in 1992. == Objectives == The ACL/DCI had several key objectives: To acquire a large and diverse text corpus from various sources To transform the collected texts into a common format based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) To make the corpus available for scientific research at low cost with minimal restrictions To provide a common database that would allow researchers to replicate or extend published results To reduce duplication of effort among researchers in obtaining and preparing text data These objectives were designed to address the growing demand for very large amounts of text arising from applications in recognition and analysis of text and speech. Its core objective was to "oversee the acquisition and preparation of a large text corpus to be made available for scientific research at cost and without royalties". == History == By the late 1980s, researchers in computational linguistics and speech recognition faced a significant problem: the lack of large-scale, accessible text corpora for developing statistical models and testing algorithms. Existing generally available text databases were too small to meet the needs of developing applications in text and speech recognition. The initiative was formed to meet this need by collecting, standardizing, and distributing large quantities of text data with minimal restrictions for scientific research. As stated by Liberman (1990), "research workers have been severely hampered by the lack of appropriate materials, and specially by the lack of a large enough body of text on which published results can be replicated or extended by others." The ACL/DCI committee was established in February 1989. The committee included members from academic and industrial research laboratories in the United States and Europe. The initiative was chaired by Mark Liberman from the University of Pennsylvania (formerly of AT&T Bell Laboratories). Other committee members included representatives from organizations such as Bellcore, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Cambridge University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, SRI International, MCC, Xerox PARC, ISSCO, and University of Pisa. The project operated initially without dedicated funding, relying on volunteer efforts from committee members and their affiliated institutions. Key supporters included AT&T Bell Labs, Bellcore, IBM, Xerox, and the University of Pennsylvania, which allowed the use of their computing facilities for ACL/DCI-related work. Previously running on volunteer effort pro bono, in 1991, it obtained funding from General Electric and the National Science Foundation (IRI-9113530). == Data == As of 1990, the ACL/DCI had collected hundreds of millions of words of diverse text. The collection included: Wall Street Journal articles (25 to 50 million words); Canadian Hansard (parliamentary records) in parallel English and French versions: cleaned-up English Hansard donated by the IBM alignment models group (100 million words), and original Bilingual Hansard (from a different time period) obtained directly (200 million words). Collins English Dictionary (1979 edition), both as fulltext (3 million words) and as various "database" versions, constructed using "typographers' tape" donated by Collins, which were computer tapes containing the structured digital data used to typeset and print the 1979 edition of the dictionary; Emails from ARPANET newsletters for the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Forum (IRLIST) and AIList Digest issues distributed over the ARPANET (AILIST) (5 million words), both collected by Edward A. Fox at VIPSU; Articles on networking (2 million words); U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service Fact Sheets (>1 million words); 200,000 scientific abstracts of about 1,500 words each from the Department of Energy (25 million words); Archives of the Challenger Investigation Commission, including transcripts of depositions and hearings (2.5 million words); Books from the Library of America, including works by Mark Twain, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, W.E.B. DuBois, Willa Cather, and Benjamin Franklin (130 books, 20 million words); Public domain books like the King James Bible, Tristram Shandy, The Federalist Papers; Several million words of transcribed radiologists' reports, donated by Francis Ganong at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc (about 5 million words); The Child Language Data Exchange corpus of child language acquisition transcripts; U.S. Department of Justice Justice Retrieval and Inquiry System (JURIS) materials; The Swiss Civil Code in parallel German, French and Italian; Economic reports from the Union Bank of Switzerland, in parallel English, German, French and Italian; About 12K words of administrative policy manuals and 14K words of administrative memos, contributed by Geoff Pullum of U.C.S.C.; Material from various ACM journals and the ACL journal Computational Linguistics; The CSLI publications series: 50-100 reports (8K words each) and 5-10 books (80K words each). The initiative started with North American English text but expanded to include Canadian French and planned to include Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian languages. At least 5 million words from the collection were tagged under the Penn Treebank project, and those tags were distributed by DCI as well. After DCI was absorbed by the LDC, the datasets were curated under LDC. == Format == The ACL/DCI corpus was coded in a standard form based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879), consistent with the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), of which the DCI was an affiliated project. The TEI was a joint project of the ACL, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, aiming to provide a common interchange format for literary and linguistic data. The initiative planned to add annotations reflecting consensually approved linguistic features like part of speech and various aspects of syntactic and semantic structure over time. == Examples == As an example of the use of ACL/DCI, consider the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus for speech recognition research. The WSJ corpus was used as the basis for the DARPA Spoken Language System (SLS) community's Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) Corpus. The WSJ corpus became a standard benchmark for evaluating speech recognition systems and has been used in numerous research papers. The WSJ CSR Corpus provided DARPA with its first general-purpose English, large vocabulary, natural language, high perplexity corpus containing speech (400 hours) and text (47 million words) during 1987–89. The text corpus was 313 MB in size. The text was preprocessed to remove ambiguity in the word sequence that a reader might choose, ensuring that the unread text used to train language models was representative of the spoken test material. The preprocessing included converting numbers into orthographics, expanding abbreviations, resolving apostrophes and quotation marks, and marking punctuation. As another example, the Yarowsky algorithm used bitext data from DCI to train a simple word-sense disambiguation model that was competitive with advanced models trained on smaller datasets. == Distribution == Materials from the ACL/DCI collection were distributed to research groups on a non-commercial basis. By 1990, about 25 research groups and individual researchers had received tapes containing various portions of the collected material. To obtain the data, researchers had to sign an agreement not to redistribute the data or make direct commercial use of it. However, commercial application of "analytical materials" derived from the text, such as statistical tables or grammar rules, was explicitly permitted. The initiative first distributed data via 12-inch reels of 9-track tape, then via CD-ROMs. Each such tape could contain 30 million words compressed via the Lempel-Ziv algorithms. The first CD-ROM distribution was in 1991, funded by Dragon Systems Inc. It contained Collins English Dictionary, WSJ, scientific abstracts provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Penn Treebank.

  Read more →
• 

  Distributional–relational database

  A distributional–relational database, or word-vector database, is a database management system (DBMS) that uses distributional word-vector representations to enrich the semantics of structured data. As distributional word-vectors can be built automatically from large-scale corpora, this enrichment supports the construction of databases which can embed large-scale commonsense background knowledge into their operations. Distributional-Relational models can be applied to the construction of schema-agnostic databases (databases in which users can query the data without being aware of its schema), semantic search, schema-integration and inductive and abductive reasoning as well as different applications in which a semantically flexible knowledge representation model is needed. The main advantage of distributional–relational models over purely logical or semantic web models is the fact that the core semantic associations can be automatically captured from corpora, in contrast to the definition of manually curated ontologies and rule knowledge bases. == Distributional–relational models == Distributional–relational models were first formalized as a mechanism to cope with the vocabulary/semantic gap between users and the schema behind the data. In this scenario, distributional semantic relatedness measures, combined with semantic pivoting heuristics can support the approximation between user queries (expressed in their own vocabulary), and data (expressed in the vocabulary of the designer). In this model, the database symbols (entities and relations) are embedded into a distributional semantic space and have a geometric interpretation under a latent or explicit semantic space. The geometric aspect supports the semantic approximation between entities from different databases, or between a query term and a database entity. The distributional relational model then becomes a double layered model where the semantics of the structured data provides the fine-grained semantics intended by the database designer, which is extended by the distributional semantic model which contains the semantic associations expressed at a broader use. These models support the generalization from a closed communication scenario (in which database designers and users live in the same context, e.g. the same organization) to an open communication scenario (e.g. different organizations, the Web), creating an abstraction layer between users and the specific representation of the conceptual model.

  Read more →
• 

  Victor Yngve

  Victor Huse Yngve (July 5, 1920 – January 15, 2012) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953-1965). He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text, a children's book called Engineer Small and the Little Train. Most importantly, he showed in computer processing terms why the human brain can only process sentences of a certain kind of complexity, ones that do not exceed a "depth limit" (which has nothing to do with length) of the kind established independently by George Miller with his depth limit of "seven plus or minus two" sentence constituents in memory at any given time. Yngve was also the author of COMIT, the first string processing language (compare SNOBOL, TRAC, and Perl), which was developed on the IBM 700/7000 series computers by Yngve and collaborators at MIT from 1957-1965. Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of linguistics, and more specifically, the area of machine translation for natural language processing. In his 1970 paper "On Getting a Word in Edgewise", Yngve coined the term 'back channel behavior' to describe the conversational phenomenon that to this day is known in the linguistic literature as back-channeling. According to Duncan, Yngve's paper also suggested the term turn-taking, independently of Erving Goffman (Duncan, 1972: 283).

  Read more →
• 

  AI Coding Assistants Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026

  Comparing the best AI coding assistant? An AI coding assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it lowers the barrier so anyone can produce professional output. Privacy matters too: check whether your data trains the model and whether a no-log or enterprise tier is available. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI coding assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

  Read more →
• 

  Necrobotics

  Necrobotics is the practice of using biotic materials (or dead organisms) as robotic components. Necrobotics can serve as an alternative to mechanical components that are difficult to manufacture by using biological components designed by natural selection in order to exploit the highly developed selective design implemented in biological lifeforms via the process of evolution. In July 2022, researchers in the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas published a paper in Advanced Science introducing the concept and demonstrating its capability by repurposing dead spiders as robotic grippers and applying pressurized air to activate their gripping arms. In April 2025 researchers at Shinshu University created a “bio-hybrid drone” using silk-worm moth antennae to detect the source of a smell. In November 2025 researchers at McGill University demonstrated the use of a mosquito proboscis as a fine nozzle in experimental 3D printing. Necrobotics utilizes the spider's organic hydraulic system and their compact legs to create an efficient and simple gripper system. The necrobotic spider gripper is capable of lifting small and light objects, thereby serving as an alternative to complex and costly small mechanical grippers. == Background == The main appeal of the spider's body in necrobotics is its compact leg mechanism and use of hydraulic pressure. The spider's anatomy utilizes a simple hydraulic (fluid) pressure system. Spider legs have flexor muscles that naturally constrict their legs when relaxed. A force is required to straighten and extend their legs, which spiders accomplish by pumping hemolymph fluid (blood) through their joints as a means of hydraulic pressure. It takes no external power to curl their legs due to their flexor muscles' natural curled state. In July 2022, researchers in the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice University published a paper detailing their experiments with the gripper. Although dead spiders no longer produce hemolymph, Te Faye Yap (lead author and mechanical engineering graduate) found that pumping air through a needle into the spider's cephalothorax (main body) accomplishes the same results as hemolymph. The original hydraulic (fluid) system is essentially converted into a pneumatic (air) system. == Fabrication == Obtain a spider Euthanize the spider using a cold temperature of around -4°C for 5-7 days Insert a 25 gauge hypodermic needle into the spider's cephalothorax (main body) Apply glue around the needle to form a seal and allow it to dry Connect a syringe or pump to the needle Extend the spider's legs by pumping air in == Testing and Data == === Internal Force Versus Gripping Force === The typical pressure in a resting spider's legs ranges from 4 kPa to 6.1 kPa. Researchers extended the legs by increasing the spider's internal pressure to 5.5 kPa. Pumping air into the body increases the internal pressure, causing the legs to expand. Pumping air out of the body decreases internal pressure, causing the legs to contract due to their flexor leg muscles. When the internal pressure decreases to 0 kPa, the gripper would be fully closed, allowing for the gripper to grasp objects. This action demonstrates that as internal pressure decreases, the gripping force increases. Inversely, when internal pressure increases, the gripping force decreases. By gripping individual weighted acetate beads, it is found that the necrobotic gripper achieves a maximum gripping force of 0.35 milinewtons. === Spider Weight Versus Gripping Force === To estimate the gripping forces of smaller and larger spiders, researchers created a plot to predict the gripping force relative to the size of the spider. The wolf spider's body weight is relatively equal to the gripping force of its legs. The mass of the gripper is 33.5 mg and can lift 1.3 times its body weight (43.6 mg or 0.35 mN). However, with larger spiders, the gripping force relative to body weight decreases. For example, a 200-gram goliath birdeater is predicted to lift 10% of its weight (20 grams or 196 mN). Though there is an inverse relationship between spider mass and gripping force, larger spiders exert greater gripping forces than smaller spiders. === Gripper Lifespan === The necrobotic gripper's functionality is entirely reliant on the structural integrity of the spider. If the spider were to break down easily and frequently, the gripper would not be practical. Using cyclic testing, a series of repeated actions, it is found that the necrobotic gripper can actuate 700 to 1000 times. After 1000 cycles, cracks begin forming on the membrane of the leg joints due to dehydration. Weakened and decomposing joints lead to frequent breakage and replacement, thereby serving as an obstacle in applying necrobotics to real-world scenarios. One theorized fix to this issue is applying beeswax or a lubricant to the joints. Researchers found that over 10 days, the mass of an uncoated spider decreased 17 times more than the mass of a spider coated with beeswax. Lubricating joints combats dehydration and slows the loss of organic material. == Constraints == With the usage of organic material, there is a higher chance of the component decomposing and breaking down as opposed to traditional mechanical systems. There may be additional work and management required to replace these grippers if they fail. Additionally, organic inconsistencies with the spiders will yield inaccurate results. Not all wolf spiders develop the same, so gripping force and leg contraction can vary between grippers. There are moral implications behind euthanizing spiders for robotics. The ethical boundaries that necrobotics push in the pursuit of biohybrid systems raise concerns, as opponents say it may lead to the hybridization of mammals and is intrusive to nature. Proponents respond that repurposing dead animals has been human practice for millennia and that necrobotics should be pursued to advance science.

  Read more →
• 

  How to Choose an AI Clip Maker

  Curious about the best AI clip maker? An AI clip maker is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI clip maker 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.

  Read more →
• 

  How to Choose an AI Website Builder

  Shopping for the best AI website builder? An AI website builder is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI website builder slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

  Read more →
• 

  Levenshtein automaton

  In computer science, a Levenshtein automaton for a string w and a number n is a finite-state automaton that can recognize the set of all strings whose Levenshtein distance from w is at most n. That is, a string x is in the formal language recognized by the Levenshtein automaton if and only if x can be transformed into w by at most n single-character insertions, deletions, and substitutions. == Applications == Levenshtein automata may be used for spelling correction, by finding words in a given dictionary that are close to a misspelled word. In this application, once a word is identified as being misspelled, its Levenshtein automaton may be constructed, and then applied to all of the words in the dictionary to determine which ones are close to the misspelled word. If the dictionary is stored in compressed form as a trie, the time for this algorithm (after the automaton has been constructed) is proportional to the number of nodes in the trie, significantly faster than using dynamic programming to compute the Levenshtein distance separately for each dictionary word. It is also possible to find words in a regular language, rather than a finite dictionary, that are close to a given target word, by computing the Levenshtein automaton for the word, and then using a Cartesian product construction to combine it with an automaton for the regular language, giving an automaton for the intersection language. Alternatively, rather than using the product construction, both the Levenshtein automaton and the automaton for the given regular language may be traversed simultaneously using a backtracking algorithm. Levenshtein automata are used in Lucene for full-text searches that can return relevant documents even if the query is misspelled. == Construction == For any fixed constant n, the Levenshtein automaton for w and n may be constructed in time O(|w|). Mitankin studies a variant of this construction called the universal Levenshtein automaton, determined only by a numeric parameter n, that can recognize pairs of words (encoded in a certain way by bitvectors) that are within Levenshtein distance n of each other. Touzet proposed an effective algorithm to build this automaton. Yet a third finite automaton construction of Levenshtein (or Damerau–Levenshtein) distance are the Levenshtein transducers of Hassan et al., who show finite state transducers implementing edit distance one, then compose these to implement edit distances up to some constant.

  Read more →
• 

  Machine learning

  Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without being explicitly programmed. Advances in the field of deep learning have allowed neural networks, a class of statistical algorithms, to surpass many previous machine learning approaches in performance. Statistics and mathematical optimisation methods compose the foundations of machine learning. Data mining is a related field of study, focusing on exploratory data analysis (EDA) through unsupervised learning. From a theoretical viewpoint, probably approximately correct learning provides a mathematical and statistical framework for describing machine learning. Most traditional machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be described as empirical risk minimisation under this framework. == History == The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used during this time period. The earliest machine learning program was introduced in the 1950s, when Samuel invented a computer program that calculated the chance of winning in checkers for each side, but the history of machine learning is rooted in decades of efforts to study human cognitive processes. In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb published the book The Organization of Behavior, in which he introduced a theoretical neural structure formed by certain interactions among nerve cells. The Hebbian theory of neuron interaction set the groundwork for how many machine learning algorithms work, with connected artificial neurons changing the strength of their connections based on data. Other researchers who have studied human cognitive systems contributed to the modern machine learning technologies as well, including Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, who proposed the first mathematical model of neural networks including algorithms that mirror human thought processes. By the early 1960s, an experimental "learning machine" with punched tape memory, called Cybertron, had been developed by Raytheon Company to analyse sonar signals, electrocardiograms, and speech patterns using rudimentary reinforcement learning. It was repetitively "trained" by a human operator/teacher to recognise patterns and equipped with a "goof" button to cause it to reevaluate incorrect decisions. A representative book on research into machine learning during the 1960s was Nils Nilsson's book "Learning Machines", dealing mostly with machine learning for pattern classification. Interest related to pattern recognition continued into the 1970s, as described by Duda and Hart in 1973. In 1981, a report was given on using teaching strategies so that an artificial neural network learns to recognise 40 characters (26 letters, 10 digits, and 4 special symbols) from a computer terminal. Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition of the algorithms studied in the machine learning field: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E." This definition of the tasks in which machine learning is concerned is fundamentally operational rather than defining the field in cognitive terms. This follows Alan Turing's proposal in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which the question, "Can machines think?", is replaced by asking whether machines can convincingly imitate a human in its responses to human-posed questions. In 2014 Ian Goodfellow and others introduced generative adversarial networks (GANs) which could produce realistic synthetic data. By 2016 AlphaGo had won against top human players in Go using reinforcement learning techniques. == Relationships to other fields == === Artificial intelligence === As a scientific endeavour, machine learning grew out of the quest for artificial intelligence (AI). In the early days of AI as an academic discipline, some researchers were interested in having machines learn from data. They attempted to approach the problem with various symbolic methods, as well as what were then termed "neural networks"; these were mostly perceptrons and other models that were later found to be reinventions of the generalised linear models of statistics. Probabilistic reasoning was also employed, especially in automated medical diagnosis. However, an increasing emphasis on the logical, knowledge-based approach caused a rift between AI and machine learning. Probabilistic systems were plagued by theoretical and practical problems of data acquisition and representation. By 1980, expert systems had come to dominate AI, and statistics was out of favour. Work on symbolic/knowledge-based learning continued within AI, leading to inductive logic programming (ILP), but the more statistical line of research was now outside the field of AI proper, in pattern recognition and information retrieval. Neural network research was abandoned by AI and computer science around the same time. This subfield, termed "connectionism", was continued by researchers from other disciplines, including John Hopfield, David Rumelhart, and Geoffrey Hinton. Their main success came in the mid-1980s with the reinvention of backpropagation. Machine learning (ML), reorganised and recognised as its own field, started to flourish in the 1990s. The field changed its goal from achieving artificial intelligence to tackling solvable problems of a practical nature. It shifted focus away from the symbolic approaches it had inherited from AI, and toward methods and models borrowed from statistics, fuzzy logic, and probability theory. === Data compression === === Data mining === Machine learning and data mining often employ the same methods and overlap significantly, but while machine learning focuses on prediction based on known properties learned from the training data, data mining focuses on the discovery of previously unknown properties in the data (this is the analysis step of knowledge discovery in databases). Data mining uses many machine learning methods, but with different goals; on the other hand, machine learning also employs data mining methods as "unsupervised learning" or as a preprocessing step to improve learner accuracy. Much of the confusion between these two research communities comes from the basic assumptions they work with: in machine learning, performance is usually evaluated with respect to the ability to reproduce known knowledge, while in knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) the key task is the discovery of previously unknown knowledge. Evaluated with respect to known knowledge, an uninformed (unsupervised) method will easily be outperformed by other supervised methods, while in a typical KDD task, supervised methods cannot be used due to the unavailability of training data. Machine learning also has intimate ties to optimization: Many learning problems are formulated as minimisation of some loss function on a training set of examples. Loss functions express the discrepancy between the predictions of the model being trained and the actual problem instances (for example, in classification, one wants to assign a label to instances, and models are trained to correctly predict the preassigned labels of a set of examples). === Generalization === Characterizing the generalisation of various learning algorithms is an active topic of current research, especially for deep learning algorithms. === Statistics === Machine learning and statistics are closely related fields in terms of methods, but distinct in their principal goal: statistics draws population inferences from a sample, while machine learning finds generalisable predictive patterns. Conventional statistical analyses require the a priori selection of a model most suitable for the study data set. In addition, only significant or theoretically relevant variables based on previous experience are included for analysis. In contrast, machine learning is not built on a pre-structured model; rather, the data shape the model by detecting underlying patterns. The more variables (input) used to train the model, the more accurate the ultimate model will be. Leo Breiman distinguished two statistical modelling paradigms: the data model and the algorithmic model, wherein "algorithmic model" means more or less the machine learning algorithms like Random forest. Some statisticians have adopted methods from machine learning, producing the field of statistical learning. === Statistical physics === Analytical and computational techniques derived from deep-rooted physics of disordered systems can be extended to large-scale problems, including machine learning, e.g., to analyse the weight space of deep neural networks. Statistical physics is thus

  Read more →
• 

  Best AI Coding Assistants in 2026

  Curious about the best AI coding assistant? An AI coding assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI coding assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

  Read more →
• 

  PROMT

  ProMT is a lead Russian developer of language translation software for businesses and private users since 1991. The company provides on-premises software based on neural technologies. == History == On March 6, 1998, ProMT launched a free online translation services, which is now known as PROMT.One. In 1997, ProMT and the French company Softissimo developed a line of products for the European company Reverso. == Technology == Historically, ProMT systems used rule-based machine translation (RBMT) technology. In 2011 a hybrid approach which combined rule-based and statistical MT was implemented. In 2019, ProMT introduced its new neural technology and flagship solution - PROMT Neural Translation Server. Since then all MT systems developed by ProMT are based on neural machine translation. The software can run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS and Android and works in offline mode providing secure machine translation. As of 2025, it translates 62 languages from and to English, German, and Russian.

  Read more →