Tag Archives: Ben Schmidt

Vector Space and Poetic Logic

I’ve been spending the weekend experimenting with vector space modelling and poetic language. Vector space word embedding models use learning algorithms on very large corpora in order map a unique location in n-dimensional space to each token (=word) in the corpus. “N-dimensional space” is just a mathy-sounding way of saying that multiple (or n) features […]

Vivid unconscious biases

Claire Caine Miller has a post on the New York Times’s “Upshot” blog on Ben Schmidt‘s visualization tool for word frequencies in 14M ratemyprofessors.com reviews, called “Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender” [9.2.15]. While in general I find Schmidt’s stuff informative, fun, and provocative [for instance, his “Lets You” finding, which […]