Style sheets

In today’s post we are going to find out a bit more about style sheets, a truly important tool within digital edition. Style sheets, grosso modo, allow us to introduce some exact instructions and orders so as to present the content of documents and websites just in the way we want or we need. The use of style sheets bring us a large number of benefits. Let’s discover some of them!

Different style sheets for a blog

Firstly, the use of style sheets let us choose the appearance of our websites or documents. This includes the colour, the underlining, the size… of fonts; the distribution an amount of  information displayed; etc. Secondly, style sheets are a truly fast way of modifying a whole document whithout changing the information that we want to provide. By only clicking one button we can give our document or website the layout that fits better with our needs.

LaTeX and TEI

We have talked in previous posts about some of the most important and successful markup languages that we can find nowadays such as, for instance, HTML, XML or XHTML. However, in today’s post I am briefly going to mention and introduce two markup languages – LaTeX and TEI – that could be new to some of you in spite of their great utility in some specific fields of knowledge.

LaTeX

The first markup language that we are going to study today is LaTeX, which was created in 1984 by Leslie Lamport in order to make easier the use of Donald Knuth’s TeX. This markup language is widely accepted among mathematicians, scientists, engineers, philosophers, economists and other scholars due to its ability to write academic and technical books containing mathematic signs and formulae.

Digital Libraries

In today’s post we are going to discover what digital libraries are. We can define them as libraries in which collections are stored in digital formats and accesible by computers. We can affirm that digital libraries are a type of information retrieval system.

Digital library concept

Moreover, one of the main ideas of this post is to present some of the most important digital libraries that nowadays exist such as Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, Google Book Search, etc. However, as I am studying a degree in English I thought that it would be appropriate to focus on one important digital library with contents in English. That is the reason why we are going to talk today about the Darlington Digital Library (University of Pittsburgh).

eBooks vs Traditional books

The quick development of  new technologies is transforming our lives dramatically in many aspects. One of them is literature. Nowadays, traditional books are living a little crisis due to the appearance of eBooks. An eBook (or electronic book) is, in plain words, a digital version of a traditional book.

An example of eBook: the new Sony Reader (model PRS-505)

So now you may be wondering why you should start using this new type of devices, right? The answer is quite simple: because they have a never ending list of advantages over traditional books. Let me illustrate this afirmation with a few examples:

Copyright: editors vs Internet users

Nowadays, we are living a quite strong conflict of interests between the Internet users and traditional editors due to the increasing digitalization of  books since the Net was born years ago. This topic has caused  and is still today causing a big controversy among the population and that is the reason why we wanted to mention here.

CEDRO Logo

As Delia Lipszyc perfectly describes in her book Nuevos temas de derecho de autor y derechos conexos, works can now be digitalized (transformed into binary code) and be uploaded to an Internet server. As soon as these works are available online, the general public can immediatly make an unlimited number of copies without the legal permission of the copyrights holder. Moreover, once downloaded, these copies can be manipulated, processed, amplified, reproduced and transferred via electronic mail and/or public website.

Questionnaire 3: Chatterbots

A chatterbot (chat bots, talk bots) is a type of conversational agent; it is a computer program known as Artificial Conversational Entity (ACE), which is designed to simulate a real conversation with human users.

ASIMO, created by Honda, is a humanoid robot that is able to walk and interact with humans.

And when we talk about a simulation, we really mean that because chatterbots are not capable of “understanding” the conversation. The way they “converse” is just simply by recognizing words or phrases from the human user, which allows them to use pre-calculated responses which can move the conversation on in an apparently meaningful way without requiring them to know what they are talking about.

Questionnaire 3: Question Answering (QA)

Have you ever asked yourself what happens when you introduce a question in your computer? No? Never? Then you will get surprised with today’s post because I am going to talk about Question Answering (QA).

Question Answering (QA)

Question Answering (QA) is, in information retrieval, the task of answering automatically a question asked in natural language. In order to provide you with a proper answer a QA computer program can use either a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents (such as the World Wide Web, for instance).

Questionnaire 2: Word Sense Disambiguation & Named Entity Recognition

We have talked in the previous post about Machine Translation (MT) because it is considered a sub-field of the Computational Linguistics that we are currently studying. Broadly speaking, MT consists of translating words or speech from one natural language to another one using translation software. As we said, MT faces two problems in two different sub-areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that we are going to discover today in this post.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." (Genesis 11:7)

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD):

In the first place, and as you all may have guessed by now, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) consists of identifying which sense of a word is the most suitable in a given sentence, considering, obviously, that the word has a large number of distinct senses. To achieve this goal there are two different possible approaches: deep approaches and shallow approaches.

Questionnaire 2: Machine Translation (MT)

Now, we have a clear idea of what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is; besides, we have already mentioned the most common tasks that have to do with NLP. In this post, what I would like to do is to start explaining briefly some of those topics for you to have a better understanding of them.

Trans·la·tion

Machine Translation (MT):

Machine Translation (MT) is a sub-field of Computational Linguistics whose main purpose is to develop computer software in order to translate automatically text or speech from one natural language to another one. At a first approach, MT substitutes words in one natural language for words in the target language. However, with the use of several corpus techniques we can obtain more complex translations.

Questionnaire 2: Classic HLT topics

Those of you who are hooked on Human Language Technologies (HLT) will already  know that along the year researchers publish books, give lectures and conferences… about different topics that have to do with this area of Computational Linguistics that we are currently studying.

"Oh, mother! Your databases are *so* 20th century!" "I just don't understand you unstructured kids!"

For that reason I have decided to bring here some of the most classic or important topics discussed in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here come the examples: