[sf-lug] Fwd: bayPIGgies meeting July 12: Natural Language Toolkit

[jim stockford]

( a few of you may be expecting the second part of Newbies'
Night, Alex Martelli's presentation of Python for Programmers,
Part 2--this has been moved to the August 9 bayPIGgies
meeting for the reason that the Natural Language Toolkit
developers are in the area only for another couple of weeks. )


> Thursday, July 12, 2007
> Location: Google
>
>
> Agenda-----------------------------
>
>
> ..... 7:30 PM ...........................
> General hubbub, inventory end-of-meeting announcements,
> any first-minute announcements.
>
>
> ..... 7:35 PM to 8:45 PM ................
> Topic: The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)
> Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper
>
>    Most human knowledge--and most human communication--is
> representedand expressed using language.
>    Language technologies permit computers to process human
> language automatically; handheld computers support predictive
> text and handwriting recognition; web search engines give
> access to information locked up in unstructured text.
>    By providing more natural human-machine interfaces and
> more sophisticated access to stored information, Natural
> Language Processing has come to play a central role in the
> multilingual information society.
>    The Natural Language Toolkit is a suite of open source
> Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research
> and development in Natural Language Processing.  NLTK
> includes some 50k lines of Python, a 380-page book
> (80% complete), and 300Mb of test data, all freely
> downloadable from http://nltk.org/index.php.
>    In this presentation, the developers of NLTK will introduce
> the field of Natural Language Processing, demonstrate the
> main features of NLTK, and describe ways for the Python
> community to participate in the ongoing development effort.
>
> About the presenters:
>
>    Steven Bird is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the
> University of Melbourne in Australia, and Senior Research Associate
> in the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania,
> specializing in R&D on models and tools for large databases of
> annotated text.  Steven edits the book series "Cambridge Studies in
> Natural Language Processing," and was recently elected president of
> the Association for Computational Linguistics.
>
>    Ewan Klein is Professor of Language Technology in the School of
> Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  He has
> also been Research Manager for the Natural Language Research Group
> of Edify Corporation, Santa Clara, and was responsible for spoken
> dialogue processing. Ewan was the founding Coordinator of the
> European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies.
> He has lead numerous academic-industrial collaborative projects,
> most recently in biological text mining.
>
>    Edward Loper is a doctoral student at the University of
> Pennsylvania, conducting research on machine learning in natural
> languageprocessing.  In addition to NLTK, Edward has helped develop
> othermajor packages for documenting and testing Python software,
> epydoc and doctest.
>
>
> ..... 8:45 PM to 9:00 PM ................
> Mapping/Random Access
>
> Mapping is a rapid-fire audience announcement of topics the announcers
> are interested in.
>
> Random Access follows immediately to allow follow up individually on
> topics of interest.
>
>
> ..... The August Meeting  ................
> The August meeting is Newbies' Night, Part 2, presenting the second
> half of Alex Martelli's Python for Programmers talk.
>