Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Natural Language Processing with Python

This is a book about Natural Language Processing. By "natural language" we mean a language that is used for everyday communication by humans; languages like English, Hindi or Portuguese. In contrast to artificial languages such as programming languages and mathematical notations, natural languages have evolved as they pass from generation to generation, and are hard to pin down with explicit rules. We will take Natural Language Processing — or NLP for short — in a wide sense to cover any kind of computer manipulation of natural language. At one extreme, it could be as simple as counting word frequencies to compare different writing styles. At the other extreme, NLP involves "understanding" complete human utterances, at least to the extent of being able to give useful responses to them.
Online book:
http://www.nltk.org/book/ch00.html



NLTK 3.0 documentation:

http://www.nltk.org/

Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers

While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? In Enlightening Symbols, popular math writer Joseph Mazur explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. He shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted.
Traversing mathematical history and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, Mazur looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the numerical system for the past two centuries. He follows the transfigurations of algebra from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. Mazur also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. He considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics.
From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book shows how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.

http://www.amazon.com/Enlightening-Symbols-History-Mathematical-Notation/dp/0691154635/


Article about the book:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2014/may/21/notation-history-mathematical-symbols-joseph-mazur

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Decision Forests for Computer Vision and Medical Image Analysis book from Microsoft Research

This is the best resource I have found for understanding and using decision tree based machine learning algorithms.  It is very thorough on both theory and practical use with comparisons with other algorithms such as SVM's and AdaBoost.

There are also a bunch of supplemental materials available for free including a very nice PowerPoint with great explanations.  The supplemental materials include C++ and C# code.

Decision Forests - Microsoft Research