PHP/ir

I had a great time at the recent PHP Benelux Conference in Belgium. There was a real mix of very interesting people to talk to, and I came away from it buzzing with new ideas (and a ridiculously long todo list). Some of the conversations I had during the weekend were around technical presenting at conferences and usergroups, so I thought I'd collect a handful of the tips that were discussed into a post, and use a few of my favourite speakers at the event to illustrate them. Read More »

A lot of interesting techniques involve taking statistical samples, and using those to predict what we'll see in the future. Usually this works pretty well, but when we're dealing with a lot of options or if we have some options that are very rare that approach can go pretty wrong. If we go down the street and note down how many men and women we see, we'll probably be able to use that to predict the chance of the next person we see being male or female pretty well. However, if we were counting all the species of animals we … Read More »

In the last post we had a simple stepping algorithm, and a gradient descent implementation, for fitting a line to a set of points with one variable and one 'outcome'. As I mentioned though, it's fairly straightforward to extend that to multiple variables, and even to curves, rather than just straight lines. Read More »

I've had a couple of emails recently about the excellent Stanford Machine Learning and AI online classes, so I thought I'd put up the odd post or two on some of the techniques they cover, and what they might look like in PHP. Read More »

It's Ada Lovelace day, giving me a (not often needed) excuse to talk about one of the most interesting people that has worked in information retrieval, Professor Karen Spärck Jones. She worked at the University of Cambridge almost up until her death in 2007, and made significant contributions to natural language processing, machine translation, and particularly to search. Read More »