When computer linguists meet crafters…..

March 22, 2009 at 10:37 pm | Posted in Craft - Misc, Misc. | 1 Comment
Tags: machine learning, party

Several friends gathered in our apartment last night for a hot-pot party that had been scheduled for months. After all the stomachs are all hopefully filled, we served some tea and involuntarily I showed the friends the crafts on my shelf. Jerry’s donkey is clearly the most popular. 😀

The conversation about the crafts has gone wild. I think the girls quite enjoyed my stuffs. Shirley’s earings got attached to different dolls. However, no one is left out! After seeing some of my amigurumis, Mars brought up a question: what’s the difference between knitting and crochetting.  I answered this question by showing him the amigurumi capsule cat and the big mouth man and telling him the latter is knited.  Then, someone started to worry about the size of the TRAINING DATA, so I showed him the pink cat as a TEST and he got it right. That’s when many people asked about OUT-OF-DOMAIN data and I need to dig out my blanket, which has totally different uses and is in totally different size. He can still figure it out. Hence, I supposed the small training set was sufficient for such a good LEARNER. 😉 The truth is I’ve got much more crocheted things at my place, so it’s safe to always go for crocheting. It might be a challenge for Mars if I still have the pouch I made for Katya.

This might not be interesting for people who do not have knowledge in machine learning.  I think it was quite a funny moment, as all the people in the party are/used to be either computational linguists or computer scientists or software engineers. 🙂