ICU - International Components for Unicode

Link: http://site.icu-project.org/

Intro: ICU is a mature, widely used set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support for software applications. ICU is widely portable and gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C/C++ and Java software.

Here are a few highlights of the services provided by ICU:

Code Page Conversion: Convert text data to or from Unicode and nearly any other character set or encoding. ICU's conversion tables are based on charset data collected by IBM over the course of many decades, and is the most complete available anywhere.

Collation: Compare strings according to the conventions and standards of a particular language, region or country. ICU's collation is based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm plus locale-specific comparison rules from the Common Locale Data Repository, a comprehensive source for this type of data.

Formatting: Format numbers, dates, times and currency amounts according the conventions of a chosen locale. This includes translating month and day names into the selected language, choosing appropriate abbreviations, ordering fields correctly, etc. This data also comes from the Common Locale Data Repository.

Time Calculations: Multiple types of calendars are provided beyond the traditional Gregorian calendar. A thorough set of timezone calculation APIs are provided.

Unicode Support: ICU closely tracks the Unicode standard, providing easy access to all of the many Unicode character properties, Unicode Normalization, Case Folding and other fundamental operations as specified by the Unicode Standard.

Regular Expression: ICU's regular expressions fully support Unicode while providing very competitive performance.

Bidi: support for handling text containing a mixture of left to right (English) and right to left (Arabic or Hebrew) data.

Text Boundaries: Locate the positions of words, sentences, paragraphs within a range of text, or identify locations that would be suitable for line wrapping when displaying the text.

Deep learning

I just find that this research topic is quite new.
I intend to get deeper into it, especially its impact in NLP research.

Some of review paper or tutorials:

1) http://deeplearning.net/
(tutorial: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/)

2) ACL 2012 tutorial:
http://www.socher.org/index.php/DeepLearningTutorial/DeepLearningTutorial

3) Ronan Collobert (http://ronan.collobert.com/)
http://ronan.collobert.com/pub/matos/2008_nlp_icml.pdf
http://ronan.collobert.com/pub/matos/2009_tutorial_nips.pdf
http://ronan.collobert.com/pub/matos/2011_nlp_jmlr.pdf

4) ...

Yet another link for HLT tools

Link: http://www.taustracker.com/browse-other-language-technologies

How to solve "incorrect side-by-side configuration" error when running VC++ app

When I compiled an app by using Visual Studio 2005 Pro on my first PC and ran that app on my second PC. I got the following error:

"The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect ... "

I found the reason. That is because the side-by-side configuration of my first PC was configured differently from the one on my second PC.

How to fix that:
- First of all, check the side-by-side configuration on registry (type regedit on cmd), proceed to the following keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide\Winners\x86_policy.8.0.microsoft.vc80.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_none_e8a8ec119a3821e7

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide\Winners\x86_policy.8.0.microsoft.vc80.atl_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_none_e8ff9ccd99f7096b

Alternatively, you can check this by using the existing tool on Windows namely Event Viewer (under Control Panel\Administration Tools). On Event Viewer, check errors on Windows Logs\Application and find the appropriate error on your app.

Next, check the Default values of the above keys. They should be the same and have the highest values (the last numbers). Importantly, these values MUST be the same on two PCs.

- Secondly, try to install the correct side-by-side configuration by downloading and installing the latest update from Microsoft website. (see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2538218 and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-025).
For example, the side-by-side configuration of the first key on my first PC is 8.0.50727.6195.
I need the update version (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2538218) which has the same value as 8.0.50727.6195.

The problem is solved. When you get the same problem, you can follow my direction.

Hope it helps!

--
Vu

Web translation service

Link: http://itranslate4.eu/en/chat

NiuTrans: A Statistical Machine Translation System

Link: http://www.nlplab.com/NiuPlan/NiuTrans.html#introduction

Intro: NiuTrans is an open-source statistical machine translation system developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Northeastern University, China. The NiuTrans system is fully developed in C++ language. So it runs fast and uses less memory. Currently it has already supported phrase-based, hierarchical phrase-based and syntax-based (string-to-tree, tree-to-string and tree-to-tree) models for research-oriented studies.

Paper (ACL 2012 Demo): http://www.nlplab.com/NiuPlan/paper/ACL2012-NiuTrans.pdf

Docent - Document-level SMT

Link: https://github.com/chardmeier/docent/wiki

Intro: Docent is a decoder for phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Unlike most existing SMT decoders, it treats complete documents, rather than single sentences, as translation units and permits the inclusion of features with cross-sentence dependencies to facilitate the development of discourse-level models for SMT. Docent implements the local search decoding approach described by Hardmeier et al. (EMNLP 2012).
Paper: https://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1108.pdf