Italy has been experiencing a COVID19 pandemic emergency since February. Despite being a small province (about 300,000 inhabitants), Piacenza was one of the epicenters of the epidemic in Italy; Codogno, where the first Italian COVID-19 diagnosed patient lives, is just … Read More
NLP
From back pain to computer issues
Fun with Language Working with natural language can be challenging and frustrating, but it can be a lot of fun too. Let me share my newest “fun with language” moment: Research is often done in English, and there are many … Read More
“A small change for a word, but a big change for the lemmatizer”
In my previous blogs, I talked about the difficulty provided by natural language (e.g. ambiguity and variety) and the medical domain (e.g. medical words unknown in common tools). Today, I want to show you another aspect: How big the impact … Read More
Can you shorten everything?
Remember my blog post about how in German you can string words together to form new ones? As mentioned in that post, this increases the possible terms for pathologies and can be frustrating when trying to find all possible variations of … Read More
«Same Difference»
When humans are talking or writing, they are not as precise as you would think. Usually, this is no issue because the meaning is implied by the context and if not, the other participants will enquire to achieve understanding. Problem … Read More
Can you come up with another one?
Did you ever wonder why computational linguists always say “natural language is ambiguous and various,” as though that is an explanation why their tasks are complicated? I mean, I get it: There are many different languages and they have different … Read More
“The more the merrier!”
This idiom describes pretty accurately how we data scientists feel about the data for our machine learning tasks. Generally speaking, the more data we have during training to put through the machine learning models, the better they get. For our … Read More