On the slim chance that someone here wants to re-implement the unmodified Kneser-Ney algorithm[0], the presentation of it by the book does not account for unknown tokens in the query not in the vocabulary. I extended the recurrence to its natural closure including unknown tokens here [https://github.com/jhanschoo/HMMTagger/blob/master/readme.pd...]. A straightforward task, but it might take you an hour or two (probably more) otherwise to obtain it and prove its correctness, seeing as I couldn't find an extension in a Google search nor is it described in the original paper as well. I believe that it would likewise be straightforward to extend this to modified Kneser-Ney as well.
[0]: The modification of using multiple discount values due to Chen & Goodman is regarded as a more well-behaved smoothing, and more popular today.
The webpage https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/ links directly to the PDF, and gives context and other download options. It's not so easy to go back from the PDF to the webpage.
Mods: I'd change the link, and the title to "...3rd Edition draft".
Everyone else: please stop linking to PDFs when there is an obvious html page to link to instead.
I found speech and language processing to be one of the most interesting courses of my degree. Recently I decided to take a look at speech synthesis again and discovered a book by Paul Taylor on this subject (http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pat40/ and draft PDF at http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pat40/ttsbook_draft_2.pdf). It is more engineering focused than other books in this area.
Note that the book was released 2009 and the draft is from 2007. While most of the content is still very relevant for understanding the basics and challenges in building TTS systems, recent progress in DNN-based synthesis (including WaveNet, GANs, and end-to-end approaches like Tacotron) is obviously not covered.
Often this stuff is used for surveillance. If you choose to study this area, please be careful how you apply your knowledge. There are plenty of positive ways to use it: contributing content classification systems to sci-hub or libgen, building tools for the disabled, automating multilingual visual design aesthetics with computational linguistics and machine learning...
Whilst I understand the concern but just Internet is now for control and tracking (chi-na is more obvious but post someone we all know better), we cannot stop the wheel.
We need an equivalent of the hippocratic oath for software engineers: I swear by Hephaestus, the ugly god of crafts, that I shall not use my skills for controlling and tracking ...
Early in my career (it began after a discussion in a tutorial during my undergrad) I made a choice to never to use my engineering skills to build weapons. I don't believe its a morally justifiable choice in this century. It's not like I have been forced to starve as a result but it did reduce a few opportunities.
Probably not. There are many countries not engaging in warfare even though they do not have nuclear weapons. Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, do not possess them, nor is there an obvious mechanism why the US' (or Britain's/France's) nuclear arsenal would discourage a war between these nations.
The US, meanwhile, has been engaged in wars almost non-stop since WW2. It's "unprecedented world peace" for for only a select few nations.
And, most importantly, the costs of failure have gone up dramatically with the invention of nuclear weapons. The Cuban Missile Crises is just one of several near-catastrophic events. Sooner or later, we will get a madman in a position of power, fall victim to a misunderstanding, or suffer a technical failure.
Great, these who want to build these things will simply hire people who don't subscribe to this oath ... And now the organization will be populated by a whole tribe of people who have no qualms about doing this -- does that sound like something that will make things better?
Aside: the book looked interesting. Skimmed it, beautiful typesetting, not gratuitously mathematical, looked readable -- I may be wrong, but it's just a exercise of adding awareness of it's existence to me.
> Great, these who want to build these things will simply hire people who don't subscribe to this oath ...
How many doctors are willing to give up their title to do unethical stuff?
An ethical code will change people's perception, and that's a big thing. It will morph the perception of Google and Facebook from cool tech companies into dark places where no decent people want to work; unless of course these companies are willing to change. And there will be a huge effect on politics, other businesses, and media.
Um, how are they supposed to make money if they don't track you to a certain extent? Do they have flaws? Yes -- it's not funny what kind of things you can target for based AdWords, their internal staff probably aren't creative enough to think up ways in which their tools can be used to inflict misery. Software engineers aren't soldiers, doctors, or civil servants what kind of ethical code do you expect? How will people be held accountable to it? What will happen to these who make transgressions?
And how are cigarette companies going to make money if they are hindered in addicting you and giving you cancer? Legally of course.
Software engineers are surrogates for ALL jobs because software is used everywhere. When we serve medicine, we should be obliged to take the Hippocratic oath. When we serve the military or intel agencies (with a security clearance), we ARE obliged to take an formal oath of secrecy. IMHO, many other S/W roles bear no less responsibility.
I think it's time that we software infrastructuralists take our role behind the scenes as seriously as those on the front lines do.
Really? As a former smoker I don't place cigarettes and software in even remotely the same category. Ok -- question. How will this be enforced? Legal/Medical/Eng have licenses to practice you can lose these licenses. I don't need anybody's approval to write code, all the tools are available for free. You are naive if you think some feel good words on paper can make this work without some force backing these words.
Let's say you're a programmer working for a tobacco company. Or for an alcohol distillery making only the most down-market 'ripple' products, inevitably consumed only by destitute inebriates dwelling in the dungeons of life. Do you really imagine that you bear no responsibility for the impact of your work when you enable the perpetuation of pain?
I've worked for several past employers whom I now disrespect (and whose leadership since earned them this disrepute), so this issue isn't merely hypothetical for me.
The principal question isn't about policing and punishment. It's about civic duty as an enlightened human being. Each of us either takes responsibility for our actions and does no harm, or we willingly do. On our part, that necessitates continuous diligence taking an interest in how the products of our work affects others.
Software has become an inescapable part of our society's technical and social infrastructure. Like scientists and engineers, S/W pros bear responsibility for how our work is used. And how it's abused. That's all I'm saying. Each of us has to work out the details for ourself, but dismissing them outright shirks that duty, and I believe, diminishes our humanity bit by bit.
People have the mistaken belief that the ideal possible world is actually one with no pain. The best solution possible with finite resources is maybe somewhere short of the the best you imagine -- to live is to suffer as they say.
You had shitty leaders I'm sorry about that, but maybe they were trying their best in a difficult situation -- it's probably not all fun choices. Or maybe they were just assholes -- updated.
I do not disagree with you on the "why" -- as Grove said I want to know how? You assume that each person can be trusted to figure this out for themselves -- maybe some people can be, but if you look at the entire population you will end with a distribution where more and more force will need to be used to coerce the fringe elements into compliance -- these fringes can destabilize the entire equilibrium since it might snow ball out of control as more and more people pile on seeing the benefits that it brings.
There is a asymmetry of how they percieve the world and you do -- the difference in available information might not be able to let them make choices that would satisfy your standards.
> Great, these who want to build these things will simply hire people who don't subscribe to this oath ..
Morally, this argument quite obviously fails because it could be used to justify anything.
Practically, we see many professions where people of character have successfully resisted temptation: every government employee who is not corrupt comes to mind.
And even if they'll just hire the next guy/gal: If you say no to an offer, you were, by definition, their top choice. That next one down the ladder will therefore be slightly worse, making such businesses less profitable.
Top choice based on a search with finite resources, maybe there is a better top choice if they spend a bit more time -- one that is also more agreeable. I'll return with a question -- Is resisting temptation the path of least resistance? What are the odds that the personality trait you describe also overlaps with the person being in a position of enough authority to actually matter?
NLTK tutorials are interesting for the absolute basics in Python, e.g. http://www.nltk.org/book/ch01.html. The field has moved into advanced Bayesian and neural methods, but NLTK still has a use in pre-processing and thinking about how to work with text. The first thing to recognize, I think, is to realize how hard many of the language tasks are that people do trivially.
I need a voice activity detection module (VAD) for my wearable computer. Should I roll my own, or use someone else's (open-source). My immediate need is speaker-dependent (just me), but it would be nice if I could offer up a speaker-independent version eventually.
Thanks! This is exactly what I needed. I was able to get it up and running on Raspberry Pi with just "pip3 install webrtcvad", and the quality is at least good enough to get me started.
[0]: The modification of using multiple discount values due to Chen & Goodman is regarded as a more well-behaved smoothing, and more popular today.