We use Hadoop, an open-source implementation of Google’s distributed file system and the MapReduce framework for distributed data processing, on modestly-sized compute clusters to evaluate its efficacy for standard machine learning tasks. We show benchmark performance on searching and sorting tasks to investigate the effects of various system configurations. We also distinguish classes of machi...

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g., "left-right"), especially when describing small-scale relationships. Other languages such as Tseltal Mayan prefer to use geocentrically-defined axes (e.g., "north-south") and do not use any type of projective body-...

Crowdsourcing is a new kind of organizational structure, one that is conducive to large amounts of short parallel work: thousands of individuals may work for several minutes on tasks, their outputs aggregated into a useful product or service. The dimensions of this new organizational form are described. Areas for future research are identified, focusing on open-ended tasks and the coordination ...

We present INDREX-MM, a main memory database system for interactively executing two interwoven tasks, declarative relation extraction from text and their exploitation with SQL. INDREXMM simplifies these tasks for the user with powerful SQL extensions for gathering statistical semantics, for executing open information extraction and for integrating relation candidates with domain specific data. ...

Common tasks involving orthographic words include spellchecking, stemming, morphological analysis, and morphological synthesis. To enable significant reuse of the language-specific resources across all such tasks, we have extended the functionality of the open source spellchecker MySpell, yielding a generic word analysis library, the runtime layer of the hunmorph toolkit. We added an offline re...

Identifying writing style shifts and variations are fundamental capabilities when addressing authorship related tasks. In this work we examine a simplified approach for unsupervised authorship and plagiarism detection which is based on binary bag of words representation. We evaluate our approach using PAN-2012 Authorship Attribution challenge data, which includes both open/closed class authorsh...