A billion monkeys

A trillion words, a billion five-word sequences, 13 million unique words appearing over 40 times! This is what has been accumulated from a Google research team in their project on n-grams.

Several aspects of this project have occurred to me before and I can see some more areas in which the research could be extended.

Google has been trawling the web for the fabric with which it is made - words - looking for the frequency with which words occur and, perhaps more interestingly, combinations of words.

This has many obvious uses - in particular in automatic error detection and in translation. It's a crude method, but if a machine can learn the structure of a language through a huge database of its current uses the chances of more natural translations increases greatly.

One idea I had while learning Chinese in Beijing came from the fact that while it's very simple to buy box sets with 'the thousand most common Chinese characters', actually, due to the structure of the language, what would be most useful would be lists of the most common character pairs, and combinations of four characters. The meaning usually comes from pairs of characters where each one individually can give only a vague idea of the meaning. This I would love to have and presumably could be quite easily be generated from an appropriate n-gram database. (If anyone already knows details about such a database, please tell me!)

And being Google, all of this data - around 24 Gigabytes, with the billions of combinations they've found is available for free which I can imagine will be of great use to linguistics departments around the world.

(*Note that the Google post shows that this news is not new, coming as it does from 2006*)

Thanks to the Google Operating system blog.

Emergent Phenomena

This eight minute video is extremely exciting. I'd come across the ideas behind using semantic links within photos to create a whole much more powerful than the sum of its parts, but this short movie from a recent conference is well worth a look to see the incredible potential from something as simple as tagging. I've written a post a while back on tagging within personal computers because the idea of folders seems completely outdated to me. The post seemed a little dry, so take a look at the movie and realise what power can be gained from this new, but incredibly simple concept.

The link for the video came from Bad Astronomy Blog and you will find more information on this sort of system in Data Mining - one of my favourite tech blogs.

This step seems to be the difference between a random collection of cells to a brain with neurons connected by synapses. The numbers involved with such combinatorics are mindblowing and the emergent phenomena will be fascinating to see.