Ask Ziggy What?

Every now and then a new company or tech tool blips on my radar that piques my curiosity. Recently, I ran across Ask Ziggy, a Sacramento California based NLP start-up. No, not a typo, they really are based in Sacramento (well, technically Rocklin, the Arlington of Sacramento).

This piqued my curiosity first and foremost because that's about 90 minutes from where I grew up in the Sacremento Valley, an area well known as a hot bed of dry summer dust, but not known as a hot bed of NLP start-ups. Then again, one of the new hot beds of tech is Austin Texas. So hey, if it can happen in Austin, why can't it happen in Sacramento?

Before I go on, let me make it clear that I do not work for Ask Ziggy in any way and this is not a sponsored blog in any way. These thoughts are entirely my own. This is my personal blog and all content is my own and reflects my honest, personal opinions.

As I flipped through Ask Ziggy's web pages, four things occurred to me:

1. "Ask Ziggy" as a brand is eerily reminiscent of "Ask Jeeves".
2. Their core goal is making it easier for app developers to use NLP speech science.
3. They have received $5 million in VC funding.
4. Is this the start of a Sacramento NLP community?

1) Ask Jeeves: Most folks in the NLP community recall Ask Jeeves, a question answering search engine from the 1990s that was going to revolutionize search. Unfortunately, Google revolutionized search way better than they did, and Ask Jeeves was forced into a series of lay offs, booms, lay offs, booms "business cycle." Today, they're best known for that annoying Yahoo! tool bar extension.

2) Making Speech Science Easy: Since Ask Ziggy is currently in "private beta," I'm actually not exactly sure what they do, but it seems like they empower an app developer to allow a user to make relatively unconstrained natural language voice commands, and their NLP technology magically "figures out" what action is appropriate (given the app's basic goals and functionality). So, maybe a music app could allow a user to speak aloud "I wonder what MIA's new song sounds like?" and Ask Ziggy's tech figures out that that's equivalent to the action command [PLAY MIA New Song].

If that's true, then that would be awesome. It is a common complaint against Siri that it doesn't "understand" a lot of commands. Maybe Ask Ziggy is applying some bleeding edge NLP, informed by contemporary psycholinguistics, to bridge the gap. Dunno. It's not clear what their special sauce is from their promotional materials, but I like the idea of relieving average app developers of the burden of learning speech science just to add voice activation to their app.

3) Five Million Dollars! Maybe I'm jaded at this point, but $5 million in VC funding is a drop in the bucket in serious NLP development-land. $5 million equals maybe 2-3 years for a modest sized group, maybe 5 years for a really small group. They received this funding near the end of 2012, it's now near the end of 2013. They'd be lucky to have $3.5 million left, with the clock ticking. It's great to get VC funding, but it's greater to get customers. What is their plan for 2015? That's the money year, as far as I can tell.

4) Sacramento is the New Google? It's great to see Sacramento developing a tech community, especially in NLP. Unlike the energy industry, the computer tech industry doesn't need natural resources nearby, so it's not tied to geography like coal, oil, or natural gas. Any two-bit town can become a tech powerhouse (I'm looking at you, Redmond Washington). Any community of practice fosters creativity and innovation. There is no a priori reason that Sacramento could not become a new generator of NLP technologies and innovation. It only requires the techies in that area to know each other, meet regularly, be open minded, and ... oh yeah, have access to that $5 million in VC capital, that helps too.

Best of luck Ziggy.

senses and metaphors

NLP guru Hal Daume (who just announced he's taking a new position at U Maryland) has a nice post on senses vs metaphors with interesting comments as well. Money quote:

But I can imagine a system roughly like the following. First, find the verb and it's frame and true literal meaning (maybe it actually does have more than one). This verb frame will impose some restrictions on its arguments (for instance, drive might say that both the agent and theme have to be animate). If you encounter something where this is not true (eg., a "car" as a theme or "passion" as an agent), you know that this must be a metaphorical usage. At this point, you have to deduce what it must mean. That is, if we have some semantics associated with the literal interpretation, we have to figure out how to munge it to work in the metaphorical case. For instance, for drive, we might say that the semantics are roughly "E = theme moves & E' = theme executes E & agent causes E'" If the patient cannot actually execute things (it's a nail), then we have to figure that something else (eg., in this case, the agent) did the actual executing. Etc.

Sounds like a job for FrameNet (if FrameNet were better ... and the page actually loaded, that is, you may have to settle for the Wikipedia entry). My own review of a sense disambiguation hypothesis here.

Manning on NLP

Freely available: The complete set of 18 lectures from Stanford Professor Christopher Manning's Natural Language Processing course. With a nifty web player that allows you to take notes on the video.

CS224N - Natural Language Processing.

Excellent description of topics so you can pick and choose your lecture. 

Crowdsourcing Annotation

(image from Phrase Detectives)

Thanks to the LingPipe blog here, I discovered an online annotation game called Phrase Detectives designed to encourage people to contribute to the creation of hand annotated corpora by making a game of it. It was created by the University of Essex, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. Of course, they have a wiki, Anawiki. I'm not crazy about the cutesy cartoon mascot (they given it a name: Sherlink Holmes. Ugh. I guess Annie would be a bit too obvious?) . I've wondered aloud about this kind of thing before, so I'm glad to see it coming to fruition.

I haven't started playing the game yet, but I'm looking forward to it. For now, here is the project description:

The ability to make progress in Computational Linguistics depends on the availability of large annotated corpora, but creating such corpora by hand annotation is very expensive and time consuming; in practice, it is unfeasible to think of annotating more than one million words.

However, the success of Wikipedia and other projects shows that another approach might be possible: take advantage of the willingness of Web users to contribute to collaborative resource creation. AnaWiki is a recently started project that will develop tools to allow and encourage large numbers of volunteers over the Web to collaborate in the creation of semantically annotated corpora (in the first instance, of a corpus annotated with information about anaphora).

Cheers.