You are looking at content from Sapping Attention, which was my primary blog from 2010 to 2015; I am republishing all items from there on this page, but for the foreseeable future you should be able to read them in their original form at sappingattention.blogspot.com. For current posts, see here.

Word embedding models

Nov 03 2015

A heads-up for those with this blog on their RSS feeds: I’ve just posted a couple things of potential interest on one of the two other blogs (errm) I’m running on my own site.

One, “Vector Space Models for the digital humanities,” describes how a newly improved class of algorithms known as word embedding models work and showcases some of their potential applications for digital humanities researchers.

The other, “Rejecting the gender binary,” is a more substantive look at how the method can help us better imagine a version of English without gendered language through some tricks of linear algebra; that results in a sort of translation dictionary between the way students talk about men and the way they talk about women.

I’m aware that this blog is sort of twisting on the vine right now. I like the politics of not using Google, and the ability to embed real javascript that comes with not using Blogger. Perhaps the humane thing to do would be retire this site and direct you to http://benschmidt.org/posts/ and http://bookworm.benschmidt.org instead. But I like keeping it around, and will probably come back here next time I have something to say about, say, the hilariously inadequate college rankings the Economist just published, or just to link other stuff.