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comment by Dendrophobe
Dendrophobe  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A word is worth a thousand vectors - Word2Vec, and why you should care

It's a bit technical, but it may be of minor interest to lil given her recent post on algorithmic text.





lil  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This article gives me an idea of what algorithmic writing is all about. Thanks -- does your name mean tree-fearing?

Dendrophobe  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes - a bit of an inside joke from my last job. I rather like biological trees :)

galen  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is that a trees/trees joke?

Dendrophobe  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm not sure.

If you're asking if it's a marijuana reference (only other common meaning for trees that I'm aware of), then no. It's due to my (alleged) aversion to trees. EDIT: It occurs to me that you're probably asking about my 'liking biological trees' comment. I'm referring to the large plants made out of wood, there.

Basically, I wrote some really slow, difficult to maintain code that operated on very, very large trees. I still work with many of the same people at a new company, and I still haven't heard the end of it.

galen  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So it is trees/trees, in that you like biological trees, but (allegedly) not data-structure trees? Awesome.

veen  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I found it quite interesting. If I recall correctly, Google uses the same method to build its Knowledge Graph. They use a similar vector technique to figure out what the subject of a photo is, for example.

Dendrophobe  ·  3544 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's just completely mind-blowing to me that it works at all. It's like

"Hey, here's a bunch of words and a rule for turning them into lists of numbers! If you do math on the numbers and convert them back to words, the results make sense!"

How bizarre is that? The whole "king - man + woman = queen" example is just insane.