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Switching from Another Industry to Engineering/CS?
WomensHealth asks: "I am a physician, but contemplating a career change perhaps 5 to 10 years down the road. In addition to medicine, what I've always loved is computers and technology, and I think I have a pretty good appreciation for both. What tips could computer industry insiders offer to one who is willing to pursue an independent educational path towards a career in a Computer Science field? MIT's OpenCourseWare seems well put-together, though one can't get a degree using it. How can an old newcomer break into the industry?"
Without thinking too much about it, we paraphrase all the time. Trying to give a sentence to a computer to reword, is a complicated task.
At Cornell, University, researchers decided to avail themselves of two different sources of the same news and use computational biology methods to make it possible for computers to automatically paraphrase input sentences. Their first step was to compare the two different sources of the same news.
Eventually, it is hoped that this research will have benefits in computer processing of natural-language queries, translation engines, and in assisting people with certain types of reading disabilities.
The project began when two ideas came together, said one of the Cornell researchers, Regina Barzilay. Regina Barzilay is an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The vast amount of duplicated content online is a valuable resource for computer systems learning to paraphrase. A number of reporters report the same news but using different wording. The redundant sources of news are able to assist in learning the different ways one piece of information can be paraphrased, as the same basic facts are reported in each. So with these multiple sources, you can sort out the noise and get the facts and then work out different ways of stating those facts.
Even with similar styles of writing, paraphrasing of sentences is more than just working out ans substituting synonyms. The researchers' provide a couple of common business phrases to illustrate this:
After the latest Fed rate cut, stocks rose across the board.
Winners strongly outpaced losers after Greenspan cut interest rates again.
The next step, was to use computational biology techniques to determine how much in common two sentences had and how closely they were related. The technique used was similar to when biologista are looking to see how close two sets of genes are that may have started from the same seed but then evolved. They are different but have a degree of similarity.
They important thing was to compare news sources that were written differently but covered the same event. This generated a whole set of word patterns that were kind of the same. This was exactly the core data needed to inform a computer paraphrasing technique.
The Reuters and AFP news sources were used to test the system. News was selected from English articles produced between September 2000 and August 2002.
The system developed by the researchers performs two groupings; firstly comparing articles from the same source:
Word-based clustering methods were used to identify sets of text that had a high degree of overlapping words. This method identified articles that reported distinct acts of violence occuring in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Computational biology techniques were then used on these sets of articles to generate lattices or sentence templates for the computer to use. Each lattice contains a number of sets of words that occur in parallel and empty slots where arguments, such as locations, number of fatalities, times and dates can be inserted.
The challenge was to sort out which lattices were indeed due to different events and which were due to writing variability.
The researchers were thus able to identify common templates used by journalists to describe similar events. Ie. journalists who take the same article and change or take out a word, add a detail, reverse the sentence and so on are hereby busted.
One of the templates, or lattices, read: Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in NAME on DATE killing NUMBER (other) people and injuring/maiming NUMBER. In addition to the injuring/maiming variable, there are several variables within the name argument: settlement of, coastal resort of, center of, southern city, or garden cafe.
43 AFP and 32 Reuters templates were thus discovered by the system. The researchers then cross-compared these lattices.
They compared the l
"So this is what it feels like
Did you come up with that joke yourself or do you have writers?
Off topic I know, but people (e.g. in california) love to claim "Frys" as the best, most popular one-stop electronics store that everyone in the world frequents. Yet, they BARELY have a presence outside of california. Hell, I'm even in the SF bay area (east bay), and the closest frys is nearly 1 hour away! Plus, of the 11 stores they have outside of CA, 6 are in texas and 2 are in AZ! People, in these situations, use Best Buy or Circuit City for your examples =). Just my $0.02
ti si treu
Any advice?
Here's how to do it.
Step 1 - Build a time machine
Step 2 - go back to 1990 and find a job in the IT sector
Step 3 - Profit!
I love a good number of NPR shows (e.g., Fresh Air), but I can't stand Prarie Home Companion or whatever it's called. There's just something about that whining, nasal, condescending voice that both turns me off and puts me to sleep. Does anyone actually like it?? It must have it's following, but I really don't get its appeal.