Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Artifical Intelligence Digs Natural Language By Design

=Better Markoff than Madoff
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3 comments:

My Frontier Thesis said...

When the social sciences and humanities can lure a graduate student who received undergraduate training in engineering, or IT, or another of those hard sciences, the benefits to humanity really demonstrate themselves. This reminds me of the late Dr. Stanley Ahler. His U of Missouri doctoral dissertation on lithic analysis is referenced and paraphrased in this Cambridge University Press publication.

If memory serves me correct, a hard science such as engineering was Ahler's undergraduate training before he turned toward lithic analysis: it had much to do with edge-wear analysis, and reclassifying arrowheads as blades and scapulas. I hear the guy had a helluva time lecturing, though, reading directly from 3"x5" cards, one at a time, very automatic like (thus demonstrating the value of humanity, a value that can be cultivated with a classical liberal education).

Such is the argument for healthy interdisciplinary studies. I worked as Ahler's water screening technician on one of his final digs, Menoken Village, before he passed from cancer. Click here for a listing of some of his technical publications. And click here if you're curious about summer 2009 projects. And click here if you're interested in joining this non-profit/scholarly research outfit for $25/year.

Tonight I tip the wine glass to Ahler for sure.

4/28/2009 11:04 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Interesting stuff, MFT. Sorry to hear of his death. The detail and focus of these government reports [those were the ones I was able to download] is impressive. [I wonder about the stark contrast between the quality of much research done under government auspices and the pathetic use, or indifference to use, shown by those officials who are supposed to be informed by these reports].
Did you ever read some of those papers on the astronomical sites of the more ancient high plains Indians [dated from BC, as I recall]? The range of archaelogical analysis that had to be brought to bear to make sense of the various sites was interesting: including some nifty shape analysis [from statistics].

4/28/2009 11:56 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Yes, one of the conundrums of the CRM "industry" I'm involved in is, after we take what I refer to as the regulatory cultural census, how are we to bring this information to the broader public? At least today, for example, the State Historical Society of North Dakota is poised to release (although one needs to access it in-house at the historical society HQ on the capital grounds in Bismarck, N.D.) a cartographic database that, topographically, contextualizes all the historic and prehistoric sites (I say "topographically" because a prehistoric site MUST be put into geological context — soil horizons and such). I'm a bit tuckered out to go into it in too much more detail immediately, but to generalize, it's a way to show the public exactly what we're tromping or driving over each and every day — layer upon layer of human inhabitation, a much different way to understand the landscape and such.

4/29/2009 12:14 AM

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