The World’s Most Active ACM Student Chapters Video Series

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Darshit Patel

Episode 2: Cornell University ACM-W Student Chapter, USA

The representation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) fields has been a much debated topic throughout the tech industry and academia in recent times. With so much attention and effort made to improve representation within industry, student-led bodies are doing their part, if not more. One of these student organizations is WICC (Women In Computing At Cornell), whose core mission is to empower women to carve their own paths in the field of computer science.

WICC is one of the most recognized ACM-W Chapters in North America, and it works tirelessly toward its mission. Alongside some great individuals from their team, over the past few months XRDS worked with WICC to find the best way to showcase their hardwork. Just as we featured the UPES ACM Student Chapter in our first video, we bring to you our second episode in the series, featuring the ACM-W chapter from Cornell University: WICC.

We hope you’ll enjoy seeing the video as much as we enjoyed making it! And please do visit their social media channels to learn more about them.

Foolproof Formulas for Boosting Your Academic Social Media

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Cori Faklaris

Featured image for blog post by Cori Faklaris: More of What Works in Social Media (For Academics)

The second of 2 blog posts on tips for academics to use social media to reach a wider audience for their research and for their careers.

Use principles such as consistency, reciprocity and the 2:1 rule to build up your content and followers on your professional social media accounts.

So you’ve set up your social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (Didn’t do that yet? See my first post: “A Professional Academic’s Guide to Using Social Media.”) Now what?

Below, I provide a few of my “tricks of the trade” — lessons I’ve learned in my time managing my own online brand and those of my employers and clients on social media. These ideas will help social media enthusiasts to go about systematically building their content and followers the way the non-academic pros do it.

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Evolution of NLP Techniques based on the Google Books Corpus

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Talia Kohen

Great Ideas in current Computer Science Research

Computer Science (CS) Research is an emergent and exciting area. Classical parts of CS are being reshaped to fit a more modern concept of computing. One domain that is experiencing a renaissance is Natural Language Processing (NLP). Classical NLP tasks are being expanded to include time-series information allowing us to capture evolutionary dynamics, and not just static information. For example, the word “bitch” was historically synonymous with a female dog, and more recently became (pejoratively) synonymous with the word “feminist.”

Fig1: The Trend of “Feminist” Over Time and Its Close Relatives

Traditional thesauruses do not contain information on when this synonymy was generated, nor the surrounding events that gave rise to this. This additional information about the historicity of the linguistic change is so innovative that it blurs the boundary between disparate disciplines: NLP and Computational Linguistics. This added dimension also allows us to challenge the foundations of traditional NLP research.

Language is the foundation of civilization. The story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible describes language as the uniting force among humanity, the key to its technological advancement and ability to become like G-d. Speaking one same language, Babel’s inhabitants were able to work together to develop a city and build a tower high enough to reach heaven. Seeing this, G-d mixes up their language, taking away the source of the inhabitants’ power by breaking down their mutual understanding. This story illustrates the power and cultural significance of universal language. Continue reading →

Automated Spelling Correction – The Basics of How it Works

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Prachi Kumar

In this post, I am going to talk about automated spelling correction. Let’s say you are writing a document on your computer, and instead of typing “morning”, you accidentally type “mornig”. If you have automated spelling correction enabled, you will probably see that “mornig” has been transformed to “morning” on its own. How does this work? How does your computer know that when you typed “mornig”, you actually meant “morning”? We are going to see how in this post.

Spelling mistakes could turn out to be real words!

Before we actually go through how spelling correction works, let’s think about the complexity of this problem. In the previous example, “mornig” was not a real word, so we knew it had to be a spelling mistake. But what if you misspelled “college” as “collage”, or you misspelled “three” as “tree”? In these cases, the word you typed incorrectly happens to be an actual word itself! Correcting these types of errors is called real word spelling correction. On the other hand, if the error is not a real word (like “mornig” instead of “morning”), correcting those errors is called non-word spelling correction. You can see that real world spelling correction seems more difficult than non-word spelling correction because every word that you type could be an error (even if it has a correct spelling). For example, the sentence “The tree threes were tail” makes no sense because every word except “the” and “were” is an error even though they are all actual words. The actual sentence should be “The three trees were tall”. In this post, I am going to talk about non-word spelling correction with a basic approach to it.

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