London Text Analytics: Inaugural Meeting

After 3 months or so in incubation, last Weds finally saw the inaugural meeting of the London Text Analytics group. A dozen or so of us convened at Fizzback‘s offices in Leicester Square, for a talk entitled “Making Natural Language Processing Work in Practical Applications” by Udo Kruschwitz of Essex University. Udo was most generous […]

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Announcing the London Text Analytics Group

OK, so after a period in stealth mode we’re now finally launching the London Text Analytics group. Well, I say “launching”, but it’s really just half a dozen of us meeting at Fizzback‘s offices for a talk and maybe a beer afterwards. It’s been a while in the making (mainly due to summer vacations & […]

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Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy

When I started the London Text Analytics meetup group some seven years ago, ‘text analytics’ was a term used by few, and understood by even fewer. Apart from a handful of enthusiasts and academics (who preferred the label of “natural language processing” anyway), the field was either overlooked or ignored by most people. Even the […]

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Text Mining and Visualization

I received a pleasant surprise in the post today: my personal copy of Text Mining and Visualization: Case Studies Using Open-Source Tools, edited by Markus Hofmann and Andrew Chisholm. Now I don’t normally blog about books, since as editor of Informer there was a time when I would be sent all manner of titles for […]

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How do you compare two text classifiers?

I need to compare two text classifiers – one human, one machine. They are assigning multiple tags from an ontology. We have an initial corpus of ~700 records tagged by both classifiers. The goal is to measure the ‘value added’ by the human. However, we don’t yet have any ground truth data (i.e. agreed annotations). […]

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Design Patterns for Spatial Information Visualisation and Analytics Applications

  That said, some immediate shortcomings of the original taxonomy were becoming apparent. Well-chosen facets should induce high entropy in the result set (e.g. through being consistent, orthogonal, exhaustively applied, etc.), and in that respect two of the values just didn’t seem appropriate: “Refining” was too low-level and task-focused, lacking the goal-directed nature of the […]

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Search Usability: Filters and Facets (training course in London)

In case you missed it last time (since it filled up pretty quickly), there’s another chance to catch my full-day designing search tutorial in London on September 18. I’ll be presenting a full day course called Search Usability: Filters and Facets, which focuses on faceted search and provides deeper coverage of the key topics along […]

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Tutorials at Search Solutions 2017

As you may recall last month I announced the line-up for Search Solutions 2017, to be held at BCS London on November 29. I’m pleased to announce that this year we’ll also be offering a Tutorial Programme, which will run the preceding day (Tuesday 28th). The programme consists of three half day-tutorials: 09:30-13:00 Designing Search […]

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New Informer – Summer 2017

Just in case you missed it, here are details of the latest issue of Informer, which came out last week. As usual, lots of good stuff, with a mix of conference reviews, feature articles and several obligatory mentions of the word ‘gamification’. Yep, even my spell checker doesn’t know that one. For further details see […]

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A scalable approach to legal question answering

Recently I’ve had the privilege of working with colleagues at Lexis Nexis on a variety of projects in the area of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. So I am pleased to share with you the following paper, which has been accepted for presentation at the 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in […]

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