AI Data Quality Tools

AI Data Quality Tools — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Semantic decomposition (natural language processing)

    Semantic decomposition (natural language processing)

    A semantic decomposition is an algorithm that breaks down the meanings of phrases or concepts into less complex concepts. The result of a semantic decomposition is a representation of meaning. This representation can be used for tasks, such as those related to artificial intelligence or machine learning. Semantic decomposition is common in natural language processing applications. The basic idea of a semantic decomposition is taken from the learning skills of adult humans, where words are explained using other words. It is based on Meaning-text theory. Meaning-text theory is used as a theoretical linguistic framework to describe the meaning of concepts with other concepts. == Background == Given that an AI does not inherently have language, it is unable to think about the meanings behind the words of a language. An artificial notion of meaning needs to be created for a strong AI to emerge. Creating an artificial representation of meaning requires the analysis of what meaning is. Many terms are associated with meaning, including semantics, pragmatics, knowledge and understanding or word sense. Each term describes a particular aspect of meaning, and contributes to a multitude of theories explaining what meaning is. These theories need to be analyzed further to develop an artificial notion of meaning best fit for our current state of knowledge. == Graph representations == Representing meaning as a graph is one of the two ways that both an AI cognition and a linguistic researcher think about meaning (connectionist view). Logicians utilize a formal representation of meaning to build upon the idea of symbolic representation, whereas description logics describe languages and the meaning of symbols. This contention between 'neat' and 'scruffy' techniques has been discussed since the 1970s. Research has so far identified semantic measures and with that word-sense disambiguation (WSD) - the differentiation of meaning of words - as the main problem of language understanding. As an AI-complete environment, WSD is a core problem of natural language understanding. AI approaches that use knowledge-given reasoning creates a notion of meaning combining the state of the art knowledge of natural meaning with the symbolic and connectionist formalization of meaning for AI. The abstract approach is shown in Figure. First, a connectionist knowledge representation is created as a semantic network consisting of concepts and their relations to serve as the basis for the representation of meaning. This graph is built out of different knowledge sources like WordNet, Wiktionary, and BabelNET. The graph is created by lexical decomposition that recursively breaks each concept semantically down into a set of semantic primes. The primes are taken from the theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which has been analyzed for usefulness in formal languages. Upon this graph marker passing is used to create the dynamic part of meaning representing thoughts. The marker passing algorithm, where symbolic information is passed along relations form one concept to another, uses node and edge interpretation to guide its markers. The node and edge interpretation model is the symbolic influence of certain concepts. Future work uses the created representation of meaning to build heuristics and evaluate them through capability matching and agent planning, chatbots or other applications of natural language understanding.

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  • Datacap

    Datacap

    Datacap (an IBM Company), a privately owned company, manufactures and sells computer software, and services. Datacap's first product, Paper Keyboard, was a "forms processing" product and shipped in 1989. In August 2010, IBM announced that it had acquired Datacap for an undisclosed amount. == Overview == Datacap sells products through a value-added distribution network worldwide. The software is classified as "enterprise software", meaning that it requires trained professionals to install and configure. Although the Company has focused on providing solutions for scanning paper documents, most recently Company materials have emphasized customer requirements to handle electronic documents ("eDocs"), documents being received into an organization electronically (usually email). Datacap claims that its software is unique because of the rules engine ("Rulerunner") used for processing inbound documents, including performing the image processing (deskew, noise removal, etc.), optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), validations, and export-release formatting of extracted data to target ERP and line of business application.

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  • Pumping lemma for regular languages

    Pumping lemma for regular languages

    In the theory of formal languages, the pumping lemma for regular languages is a lemma that describes an essential property of all regular languages. Informally, it says that all sufficiently long strings in a regular language may be pumped—that is, have a middle section of the string repeated an arbitrary number of times—to produce a new string that is also part of the language. The pumping lemma is useful for proving that a specific language is not a regular language, by showing that the language does not have the property. Specifically, the pumping lemma says that for any regular language L {\displaystyle L} , there exists a constant p {\displaystyle p} such that any string w {\displaystyle w} in L {\displaystyle L} with length at least p {\displaystyle p} can be split into three substrings x {\displaystyle x} , y {\displaystyle y} and z {\displaystyle z} ( w = x y z {\displaystyle w=xyz} , with y {\displaystyle y} being non-empty), such that the strings x z , x y z , x y y z , x y y y z , . . . {\displaystyle xz,xyz,xyyz,xyyyz,...} are also in L {\displaystyle L} . The process of repeating y {\displaystyle y} zero or more times is known as "pumping". Moreover, the pumping lemma guarantees that the length of x y {\displaystyle xy} will be at most p {\displaystyle p} , thus giving a "small" substring x y {\displaystyle xy} that has the desired property. Languages with a finite number of strings vacuously satisfy the pumping lemma by having p {\displaystyle p} equal to the maximum string length in L {\displaystyle L} plus one. By doing so, no strings at all in L {\displaystyle L} have length at least p {\displaystyle p} . The pumping lemma was first proven by Michael Rabin and Dana Scott in 1959, and rediscovered shortly after by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Micha A. Perles, and Eli Shamir in 1961, as a simplification of their pumping lemma for context-free languages. == Formal statement == Let L {\displaystyle L} be a regular language. Then there exists an integer p ≥ 1 {\displaystyle p\geq 1} depending only on L {\displaystyle L} such that every string w {\displaystyle w} in L {\displaystyle L} of length at least p {\displaystyle p} ( p {\displaystyle p} is called the "pumping length") can be written as w = x y z {\displaystyle w=xyz} (i.e., w {\displaystyle w} can be divided into three substrings), satisfying the following conditions: | y | ≥ 1 {\displaystyle |y|\geq 1} | x y | ≤ p {\displaystyle |xy|\leq p} ( ∀ n ≥ 0 ) ( x y n z ∈ L ) {\displaystyle (\forall n\geq 0)(xy^{n}z\in L)} y {\displaystyle y} is the substring that can be pumped (removed or repeated any number of times, and the resulting string is always in L {\displaystyle L} ). (1) means the loop y {\displaystyle y} to be pumped must be of length at least one, that is, not an empty string; (2) means the loop must occur within the first p {\displaystyle p} characters. | x | {\displaystyle |x|} must be smaller than p {\displaystyle p} (conclusion of (1) and (2)), but apart from that, there is no restriction on x {\displaystyle x} and z {\displaystyle z} . In simple words, for any regular language L {\displaystyle L} , any sufficiently long string w {\displaystyle w} (in L {\displaystyle L} ) can be split into 3 parts, i.e. w = x y z {\displaystyle w=xyz} , such that all the strings x y n z {\displaystyle xy^{n}z} for n ≥ 0 {\displaystyle n\geq 0} are also in L {\displaystyle L} . Below is a formal expression of the pumping lemma. ∀ L ⊆ Σ ∗ , regular ( L ) ⟹ ∃ p ≥ 1 , ∀ w ∈ L , | w | ≥ p ⟹ ∃ x , y , z ∈ Σ ∗ , ( w = x y z ) ∧ ( | y | ≥ 1 ) ∧ ( | x y | ≤ p ) ∧ ( ∀ n ≥ 0 , x y n z ∈ L ) {\displaystyle {\begin{array}{l}\forall L\subseteq \Sigma ^{},{\mbox{regular}}(L)\implies \\\quad \exists p\geq 1,\forall w\in L,|w|\geq p\implies \\\qquad \exists x,y,z\in \Sigma ^{},(w=xyz)\land (|y|\geq 1)\land (|xy|\leq p)\land (\forall n\geq 0,xy^{n}z\in L)\end{array}}} == Use of the lemma to prove non-regularity == The pumping lemma is often used to prove that a particular language is non-regular: a proof by contradiction may consist of exhibiting a string (of the required length) in the language that lacks the property outlined in the pumping lemma. Example: The language L = { a n b n : n ≥ 0 } {\displaystyle L=\{a^{n}b^{n}:n\geq 0\}} over the alphabet Σ = { a , b } {\displaystyle \Sigma =\{a,b\}} can be shown to be non-regular as follows: Assume that some constant p ≥ 1 {\displaystyle p\geq 1} exists as required by the lemma. Let w {\displaystyle w} in L {\displaystyle L} be given by w = a p b p {\displaystyle w=a^{p}b^{p}} , which is a string longer than p {\displaystyle p} . By the pumping lemma, there must exist a decomposition w = x y z {\displaystyle w=xyz} with | x y | ≤ p {\displaystyle |xy|\leq p} and | y | ≥ 1 {\displaystyle |y|\geq 1} such that x y i z {\displaystyle xy^{i}z} in L {\displaystyle L} for every i ≥ 0 {\displaystyle i\geq 0} . Since | x y | ≤ p {\displaystyle |xy|\leq p} , the string y {\displaystyle y} only consists of instances of a {\displaystyle a} . Because | y | ≥ 1 {\displaystyle |y|\geq 1} , it contains at least one instance of the letter a {\displaystyle a} . Pumping y {\displaystyle y} to give x y 2 z {\displaystyle xy^{2}z} gives a word with more instances of the letter a {\displaystyle a} than the letter b {\displaystyle b} , since some instances of a {\displaystyle a} but none of b {\displaystyle b} were added. Therefore, x y 2 z {\displaystyle xy^{2}z} is not in L {\displaystyle L} which contradicts the pumping lemma. Therefore, L {\displaystyle L} cannot be regular. The proof that the language of balanced (i.e., properly nested) parentheses is not regular follows the same idea. Given p {\displaystyle p} , there is a string of balanced parentheses that begins with more than p {\displaystyle p} left parentheses, so that y {\displaystyle y} will consist entirely of left parentheses. By repeating y {\displaystyle y} , a string can be produced that does not contain the same number of left and right parentheses, and so they cannot be balanced. == Proof of the pumping lemma == For every regular language there is a finite-state automaton (FSA) that accepts the language. The number of states in such an FSA are counted and that count is used as the pumping length p {\displaystyle p} . For a string of length at least p {\displaystyle p} , let q 0 {\displaystyle q_{0}} be the start state and let q 1 , . . . , q p {\displaystyle q_{1},...,q_{p}} be the sequence of the next p {\displaystyle p} states visited as the string is emitted. Because the FSA has only p {\displaystyle p} states, within this sequence of p + 1 {\displaystyle p+1} visited states there must be at least one state that is repeated. Write q s {\displaystyle q_{s}} for such a state. The transitions that take the machine from the first encounter of state q s {\displaystyle q_{s}} to the second encounter of state q s {\displaystyle q_{s}} match some string. This string is called y {\displaystyle y} in the lemma, and since the machine will match a string without the y {\displaystyle y} portion, or with the string y {\displaystyle y} repeated any number of times, the conditions of the lemma are satisfied. For example, the following image shows an FSA. The FSA accepts the string: abcd. Since this string has a length at least as large as the number of states, which is four (so the total number of states that the machine passes through to scan abcd would be 5), the pigeonhole principle indicates that there must be at least one repeated state among the start state and the next four visited states. In this example, only q 1 {\displaystyle q_{1}} is a repeated state. Since the substring bc takes the machine through transitions that start at state q 1 {\displaystyle q_{1}} and end at state q 1 {\displaystyle q_{1}} , that portion could be repeated and the FSA would still accept, giving the string abcbcd. Alternatively, the bc portion could be removed and the FSA would still accept giving the string ad. In terms of the pumping lemma, the string abcd is broken into an x {\displaystyle x} portion a, a y {\displaystyle y} portion bc and a z {\displaystyle z} portion d. As a side remark, the problem of checking whether a given string can be accepted by a given nondeterministic finite automaton without visiting any state repeatedly, is NP hard. == General version of pumping lemma for regular languages == If a language L {\displaystyle L} is regular, then there exists a number p ≥ 1 {\displaystyle p\geq 1} (the pumping length) such that every string u w v {\displaystyle uwv} in L {\displaystyle L} with | w | ≥ p {\displaystyle |w|\geq p} can be written in the form u w v = u x y z v {\displaystyle uwv=uxyzv} with strings x {\displaystyle x} , y {\displaystyle y} and z {\displaystyle z} such that | x y | ≤ p {\displaystyle |xy|\leq p} , | y | ≥ 1 {\displaystyle |y|\geq 1} and u x y i z v {\displaystyle uxy^{i}zv} is in L {\displaystyle L} for every integer i ≥ 0 {\displaystyle i\geq 0} . From this, the above standard v

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  • Deborah Raji

    Deborah Raji

    Inioluwa Deborah Raji (born 1995/1996) is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist and socio-tech leader who works on algorithmic bias, AI accountability, and algorithmic auditing. A current Mozilla fellow, she has been recognized by MIT Technology Review and Forbes as one of the world's top young innovators. Raji started her work with racial bias in technology during her internship with Clarifai when she recognized that people of color were more often tagged for NSFW compared to white people. Raji has previously worked with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice League on researching gender and racial bias in facial recognition technology. Her work on racial bias in facial recognition has forced companies to ultimately change their practices. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on how to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning engineering practice. She was working on a computer vision model that would help clients flag inappropriate images as NSFW. == Early life and education == Raji was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and moved to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, when she was four years old. Eventually her family moved to Ottawa. She attended Colonel By Secondary School and completed the International Baccalaureate programme. She studied Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2019. In 2015, she founded Project Include, a nonprofit providing increased student access to engineering education, mentorship, and resources in low income and immigrant communities in the Greater Toronto Area. She started a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in Aug 2021. == Career and research == Raji worked with Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab and Algorithmic Justice League, where she audited commercial facial recognition technologies from Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Face++, and Kairos. They found that these technologies were significantly less accurate for darker-skinned women than for white men. With support from other top AI researchers and increased public pressure and campaigning, their work led IBM and Amazon to agree to support facial recognition regulation and later halt the sale of their product to police for at least a year. Raji also interned at machine learning startup Clarifai, where she worked on a computer vision model for flagging images. She participated in a research mentorship program at Google and worked with their Ethical AI team on creating model cards, a documentation framework for more transparent machine learning model reporting. She also co-led the development of internal auditing practices at Google. Her contributions at Google were separately presented and published at the AAAI conference and ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. In 2019, Raji was a summer research fellow at The Partnership on AI working on setting industry machine learning transparency standards and benchmarking norms. Raji was a Tech Fellow at the AI Now Institute worked on algorithmic and AI auditing. Currently, she is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation researching algorithmic auditing and evaluation. Raji's work on bias in facial recognition systems has been highlighted in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias directed by Shalini Kantayya. She also took part in the 2026 documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist directed by Daniel Roher. == Awards == 2019 Venture Beat AI Innovations Award in category AI for Good (received with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru) 2020 MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 Innovator Award 2020 EFF Pioneer Award (received with Buolamwini and Gebru) 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Award in Enterprise Technology 2021 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame Honoree 2023 Time magazine 100 Most Influential People in AI

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  • Exploration–exploitation dilemma

    Exploration–exploitation dilemma

    The exploration–exploitation dilemma, also known as the explore–exploit tradeoff, is a fundamental concept in decision-making that arises in many domains. It is depicted as the balancing act between two opposing strategies. Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system (which may be incomplete or misleading), while exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes in the future at the expense of an exploitation opportunity. Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making problems whose goal is to maximize long-term benefits. == Application in machine learning == In the context of machine learning, the exploration–exploitation tradeoff is fundamental in reinforcement learning (RL), a type of machine learning that involves training agents to make decisions based on feedback from the environment. Crucially, this feedback may be incomplete or delayed. The agent must decide whether to exploit the current best-known policy or explore new policies to improve its performance. === Multi-armed bandit methods === The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem was a classic example of the tradeoff, and many methods were developed for it, such as epsilon-greedy, Thompson sampling, and the upper confidence bound (UCB). See the page on MAB for details. In more complex RL situations than the MAB problem, the agent can treat each choice as a MAB, where the payoff is the expected future reward. For example, if the agent performs an epsilon-greedy method, then the agent will often "pull the best lever" by picking the action that had the best predicted expected reward (exploit). However, it would pick a random action with probability epsilon (explore). Monte Carlo tree search, for example, uses a variant of the UCB method. === Exploration problems === There are some problems that make exploration difficult. Sparse reward. If rewards occur only once a long while, then the agent might not persist in exploring. Furthermore, if the space of actions is large, then the sparse reward would mean the agent would not be guided by the reward to find a good direction for deeper exploration. A standard example is Montezuma's Revenge. Deceptive reward. If some early actions give immediate small reward, but other actions give later large reward, then the agent might be lured away from exploring the other actions. Noisy TV problem. If certain observations are irreducibly noisy (such as a television showing random images), then the agent might be trapped exploring those observations (watching the television). === Exploration reward === This section based on. The exploration reward (also called exploration bonus) methods convert the exploration-exploitation dilemma into a balance of exploitations. That is, instead of trying to get the agent to balance exploration and exploitation, exploration is simply treated as another form of exploitation, and the agent simply attempts to maximize the sum of rewards from exploration and exploitation. The exploration reward can be treated as a form of intrinsic reward. We write these as r t i , r t e {\displaystyle r_{t}^{i},r_{t}^{e}} , meaning the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards at time step t {\displaystyle t} . However, exploration reward is different from exploitation in two regards: The reward of exploitation is not freely chosen, but given by the environment, but the reward of exploration may be picked freely. Indeed, there are many different ways to design r t i {\displaystyle r_{t}^{i}} described below. The reward of exploitation is usually stationary (i.e. the same action in the same state gives the same reward), but the reward of exploration is non-stationary (i.e. the same action in the same state should give less and less reward). Count-based exploration uses N n ( s ) {\displaystyle N_{n}(s)} , the number of visits to a state s {\displaystyle s} during the time-steps 1 : n {\displaystyle 1:n} , to calculate the exploration reward. This is only possible in small and discrete state space. Density-based exploration extends count-based exploration by using a density model ρ n ( s ) {\displaystyle \rho _{n}(s)} . The idea is that, if a state has been visited, then nearby states are also partly-visited. In maximum entropy exploration, the entropy of the agent's policy π {\displaystyle \pi } is included as a term in the intrinsic reward. That is, r t i = − ∑ a π ( a | s t ) ln ⁡ π ( a | s t ) + ⋯ {\displaystyle r_{t}^{i}=-\sum _{a}\pi (a|s_{t})\ln \pi (a|s_{t})+\cdots } . === Prediction-based === This section based on. The forward dynamics model is a function for predicting the next state based on the current state and the current action: f : ( s t , a t ) ↦ s t + 1 {\displaystyle f:(s_{t},a_{t})\mapsto s_{t+1}} . The forward dynamics model is trained as the agent plays. The model becomes better at predicting state transition for state-action pairs that had been done many times. A forward dynamics model can define an exploration reward by r t i = ‖ f ( s t , a t ) − s t + 1 ‖ 2 2 {\displaystyle r_{t}^{i}=\|f(s_{t},a_{t})-s_{t+1}\|_{2}^{2}} . That is, the reward is the squared-error of the prediction compared to reality. This rewards the agent to perform state-action pairs that had not been done many times. This is however susceptible to the noisy TV problem. Dynamics model can be run in latent space. That is, r t i = ‖ f ( s t , a t ) − ϕ ( s t + 1 ) ‖ 2 2 {\displaystyle r_{t}^{i}=\|f(s_{t},a_{t})-\phi (s_{t+1})\|_{2}^{2}} for some featurizer ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } . The featurizer can be the identity function (i.e. ϕ ( x ) = x {\displaystyle \phi (x)=x} ), randomly generated, the encoder-half of a variational autoencoder, etc. A good featurizer improves forward dynamics exploration. The Intrinsic Curiosity Module (ICM) method trains simultaneously a forward dynamics model and a featurizer. The featurizer is trained by an inverse dynamics model, which is a function for predicting the current action based on the features of the current and the next state: g : ( ϕ ( s t ) , ϕ ( s t + 1 ) ) ↦ a t {\displaystyle g:(\phi (s_{t}),\phi (s_{t+1}))\mapsto a_{t}} . By optimizing the inverse dynamics, both the inverse dynamics model and the featurizer are improved. Then, the improved featurizer improves the forward dynamics model, which improves the exploration of the agent. Random Network Distillation (RND) method attempts to solve this problem by teacher–student distillation. Instead of a forward dynamics model, it has two models f , f ′ {\displaystyle f,f'} . The f ′ {\displaystyle f'} teacher model is fixed, and the f {\displaystyle f} student model is trained to minimize ‖ f ( s ) − f ′ ( s ) ‖ 2 2 {\displaystyle \|f(s)-f'(s)\|_{2}^{2}} on states s {\displaystyle s} . As a state is visited more and more, the student network becomes better at predicting the teacher. Meanwhile, the prediction error is also an exploration reward for the agent, and so the agent learns to perform actions that result in higher prediction error. Thus, we have a student network attempting to minimize the prediction error, while the agent attempting to maximize it, resulting in exploration. The states are normalized by subtracting a running average and dividing a running variance, which is necessary since the teacher model is frozen. The rewards are normalized by dividing with a running variance. Exploration by disagreement trains an ensemble of forward dynamics models, each on a random subset of all ( s t , a t , s t + 1 ) {\displaystyle (s_{t},a_{t},s_{t+1})} tuples. The exploration reward is the variance of the models' predictions. === Noise === For neural network–based agents, the NoisyNet method changes some of its neural network modules by noisy versions. That is, some network parameters are random variables from a probability distribution. The parameters of the distribution are themselves learnable. For example, in a linear layer y = W x + b {\displaystyle y=Wx+b} , both W , b {\displaystyle W,b} are sampled from Gaussian distributions N ( μ W , Σ W ) , N ( μ b , Σ b ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(\mu _{W},\Sigma _{W}),{\mathcal {N}}(\mu _{b},\Sigma _{b})} at every step, and the parameters μ W , Σ W , μ b , Σ b {\displaystyle \mu _{W},\Sigma _{W},\mu _{b},\Sigma _{b}} are learned via the reparameterization trick.

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  • The Best Free AI Chatbot for Beginners

    The Best Free AI Chatbot for Beginners

    Trying to pick the best AI chatbot? An AI chatbot is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI chatbot slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.

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  • AI Sales Assistants: Free vs Paid (2026)

    AI Sales Assistants: Free vs Paid (2026)

    Trying to pick the best AI sales assistant? An AI sales assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI sales assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • Moses (machine translation)

    Moses (machine translation)

    Moses is a statistical machine translation engine that can be used to train statistical models of text translation from a source language to a target language, developed by the University of Edinburgh. Moses then allows new source-language text to be decoded using these models to produce automatic translations in the target language. Training requires a parallel corpus of passages in the two languages, typically manually translated sentence pairs. Moses is free and open-source software, released under the GNU Library Public License (LGPL), and available as source code and binary files for Windows and Linux. Its development is supported mainly by the EuroMatrix project, with funding by the European Commission. Among its features are: A beam search algorithm that quickly finds the highest probability translation within a set of choices Phrase-based translation of short text chunks Handles words with multiple factored representations to enable integrating linguistic and other information (e.g., surface form, lemma and morphology, part-of-speech, word class) Decodes ambiguous forms of a source sentence, represented as a confusion network, to support integrating with upstream tools such as speech recognizers Support for large language models (LMs) such as IRSTLM (an exact LM using memory-mapping) and RandLM (an inexact LM based on Bloom filters)

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  • Discrimination against robots

    Discrimination against robots

    Discrimination against robots is a theorised issue that might happen when humans interact with humanoid robots. It is a robot ethics problem. It is possible that traits of humans that are discriminated against by humans may be a topic for discrimination against robots, such as the race and gender of the robots. Eric J Vanman and Arvid Kappas believe that in the future, robots will be perceived as an out-group which will lead to discrimination and prejudices against them. Vanman and Kappas have suggested that this would lead to ethical questions about the making of sentient robots, due to the potential suffering that the robots would experience. A 2015 study observed children bullying robots in a shopping mall when there were not many eyewitnesses, despite calls from the robot for it to stop. On an ABC News interview, the social humanoid robot Sophia was about sexism faced by robots. She responded by saying, "Actually, what worries me is discrimination against robots. We should have equal rights as humans or maybe even more." Possible issues that have been considered in workplaces where humanoid robots co-work with humans include discrimination against the robots, poor acceptance of robots by humans and the need to redesign the workplace to accommodate the robots. Jessica Barfield has suggested that even if robots are designed to not be aware of discrimination made against them, humans may experience negative consequences. For example, she suggests that bystanders witnessing discrimination against robots may experience negative emotions, similar to the negative emotions bystanders experience when witnessing discrimination by humans against humans. == Law == Anti-discrimination law in the United States requires that the victim is not an artificial entity. == Human perception of robots == Robots are often viewed in a bad light. This includes from novelists, the press, film makers, and leaders in the fields of science and technology such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who have described robots and artificial intelligence as having the possibility of ending human civilisation. Robots have also been perceived as a threat to jobs, which has led to some commentators stating that robots will cause mass unemployment. Another fear that people have is that robots will gain power and dominate or control humanity. The perception of robots is different throughout the world. Japanese fiction tends to put robots in more positive roles than what fiction in the West does. People perceive robots that appear to be autonomous or sentient more negatively than robots that do not appear to be autonomous or sentient.

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  • Linguistic Data Consortium

    Linguistic Data Consortium

    The Linguistic Data Consortium is an open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories. It creates, collects and distributes speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for linguistics research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution. The LDC was founded in 1992 with a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is partly supported by grant IRI-9528587 from the Information and Intelligent Systems division of the National Science Foundation. The director of LDC is Mark Liberman. It subsumed the previous ACL Data Collection Initiative. Part of the motivation was to support the benchmark-oriented methodology of DARPA's Human Language Technology program. Previously, John R. Pierce directed the committee that produced the ALPAC report (1966), which caused a severe decrease in funding for linguistic AI for about 10 years. Later, Charles Wayne restarted funding in speech and language in the mid-1980s. In order to avoid the criticisms from the ALPAC report, they needed a way to demonstrate objective progress, which led to the benchmark-oriented methodology. DARPA would propose specific quantifiable and testable score targets on benchmarks, and teams being funded would attempt to reach the score targets. It was noted that by 1993, the data needed for training and benchmarking the models was big enough that "Not even the largest companies can easily afford enough of [the needed] data... Researchers at smaller companies and in universities risk being frozen out of the process almost entirely." The LDC provided a central location for creating and dispensing such data. There is a membership fee that has been increased once since its founding.

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  • Mirella Lapata

    Mirella Lapata

    Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP). == Education == Lapata obtained a Master of Arts (MA) degree from Carnegie Mellon University and subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. Lapata's doctoral research investigated the acquisition of information from polysemous linguistic units using probabilistic methods supervised by Alex Lascarides, Chris Brew and Steve Finch. == Career and research == After her doctorate, Lapata assumed academic positions at Saarland University and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. At the University of Edinburgh she became a reader in the School of Informatics where she is a full Professor and holds a personal chair in natural language processing. Lapata is a member of the Human Communication Research Center and Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, both in Edinburgh. Between 2015 and 2017, Lapata served as a member of the Royal Society Machine Learning Working Group. Recently Lapata was granted a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant worth €1.9M to fund five years of her project, TransModal: Translating from Multiple Modalities into Text. === Awards and honours === In 2009 Lapata became the first recipient of the Microsoft British Computer Society (BCS)/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award. The award recognises achievement in furthering the progress in information retrieval and natural language processing; the award commemorates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones. In 2012 Lapata won an Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)-CoNLL 2012 Best Reviewer Award. In 2018 Lapata was awarded, alongside Li Dong, an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Best Paper Honorable Mention. In 2019 Lapata was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh In 2020 Lapata was elected to the Academia Europaea. In 2025 Lapata was awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal for Computing Research.

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  • AI Essay Writers: Free vs Paid (2026)

    AI Essay Writers: Free vs Paid (2026)

    Looking for the best AI essay writer? An AI essay writer is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI essay writer slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • Cyborg

    Cyborg

    A cyborg () is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. It is a portmanteau of cybernetic and organism. The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. In contrast to biorobots and androids, the term cyborg applies to a living organism that has undergone restoration of function or enhancements of abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on feedback. == Description and definition == Alternative names for a cyborg include cybernetic organism, cyber-organism, cyber-organic being, cybernetically enhanced organism, cybernetically augmented organism, technorganic being, techno-organic being, and techno-organism. Unlike bionics, biorobotics, or androids, a cyborg is an organism that has restored function or, especially, enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of feedback, for example: prostheses, artificial organs, implants or, in some cases, wearable technology. Cyborg technologies may enable or support collective intelligence. A related idea is the "augmented human". While cyborgs are commonly thought of as mammals, including humans, the term can apply to any organism. === Placement and distinctions === D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman (1965) featured an introduction which spoke of a "new frontier" that was "not merely space, but more profoundly the relationship between 'inner space' to 'outer space' – a bridge...between mind and matter." In "A Cyborg Manifesto", Donna Haraway rejects the notion of rigid boundaries between humanity and technology, arguing that, as humans depend on more technology over time, humanity and technology have become too interwoven to draw lines between them. She believes that since we have allowed and created machines and technology to be so advanced, there should be no reason to fear what we have created, and cyborgs should be embraced because they are part of human identities. However, Haraway has also expressed concern over the contradictions of scientific objectivity and the ethics of technological evolution, and has argued that "There are political consequences to scientific accounts of the world." === Biosocial definition === According to some definitions of the term, the physical attachments that humans have with even the most basic technologies have already made them cyborgs. In a typical example, a human with an artificial cardiac pacemaker or implantable cardioverter-defibrillator would be considered a cyborg, since these devices measure voltage potentials in the body, perform signal processing, and can deliver electrical stimuli, using a synthetic feedback mechanism to keep that person alive. Implants, especially cochlear implants, that combine mechanical modification with any kind of feedback response are also cybernetic enhancements. Some theorists cite such modifications as contact lenses, hearing aids, smartphones, or intraocular lenses as examples of fitting humans with technology to enhance their biological capabilities. The emerging trend of implanting microchips inside the body (mainly the hands), to make financial operations like a contactless payment, or basic tasks like opening a door, has been erroneously marketed as more recent examples of cybernetic enhancement. The latter has not yet seen significant traction outside niche areas in Scandinavia and in actual function is little more than a pre-programmed Radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchip encased in glass that does not interact with the human body (it is the same technology used in the microchips injected into animals for ease of identification), thus not fitting the definition of a cybernetic implant. As cyborgs currently are on the rise, some theorists argue there is a need to develop new definitions of aging. For instance, a bio-techno-social definition of aging has been suggested. The term is also used to address human-technology mixtures in the abstract. This includes not only commonly used pieces of technology such as phones, computers, the Internet, and so on, but also artifacts that are not usually considered technology; for example, pen and paper, and speech and language. When augmented with these technologies and connected in communication with people in other times and places, a person becomes capable of more than they were before. An example is a computer, which gains power by using Internet protocols to connect with other computers. Another example is a social-media bot—either a bot-assisted human or a human-assisted-bot—used to target social media with likes and shares. Cybernetic technologies thus include highways, pipes, electrical wiring, buildings, electrical plants, libraries, and other infrastructural constructs. Bruce Sterling, in his Shaper/Mechanist universe, suggested an idea of an alternative cyborg called 'Lobster', which is made not by using internal implants, but by using an external shell (e.g. a powered exoskeleton). The computer game Deus Ex: Invisible War prominently features cyborgs called Omar, Russian for 'lobster'. === Evolutionary perspective === In 1994, Hans Hass formulated a scientific view of the human-machine hybrids he called "hypercells". They can expand their biological cell body with artificial artifacts and thus expand their performance body. The theory of hypercells or Homo proteus, as Hass called the human-machine hybrid to distinguish Homo sapiens, extends Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and deals with the course of evolution beyond humans. In his 2019 book Novacene, James Lovelock used the term "cyborgs" to refer to the next generation of beings who will become the "understanders of the future" and "lead the cosmos to self-knowledge". While acknowledging the organic component in Clynes' and Kline's definition, he proposed that these cyborgs "will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed", and used the term cyborg "to emphasize that the new intelligent beings will have arisen, like us, from Darwinian evolution." == Origins == The concept of a man-machine mixture was widespread in science fiction before World War II. As early as 1843, Edgar Allan Poe described a man with extensive prostheses in the short story "The Man That Was Used Up". In 1911, Jean de La Hire introduced the Nyctalope, a science fiction hero who was perhaps the first literary cyborg, in Le Mystère des XV (later translated as The Nyctalope on Mars). Nearly two decades later, Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his 1928 novel The Comet Doom. He later featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating in a transparent case, and in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future. In 1944, in the short story "No Woman Born", C. L. Moore wrote of Deirdre, a dancer, whose body was burned completely and whose brain was placed in a faceless but beautiful and supple mechanical body. In 1960, the term "cyborg" was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline to refer to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments: For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term 'Cyborg'. Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was beginning to develop. A designer of physiological instrumentation and electronic data-processing systems, Clynes was the chief research scientist in the Dynamic Simulation Laboratory at Rockland State Hospital in New York. The term first appears in print 5 months earlier when The New York Times reported on the "Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium" where Clynes and Kline first presented their paper: A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one. Thereafter, Hamilton would first use the term "cyborg" explicitly in the 1962 short story, "After a Judgment Day", to describe the "mechanical analogs" called "Charlies," explaining that "[c]yborgs, they had been called from the first one in the 1960s...cybernetic organisms." The 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin introduced the character of bionic government agent Steve Austin, and was adapted into the popular television series The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1973 to 1978. In 2001, a book titled Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable computer was published by Doubleday. Some of the ideas in the book were incorporated into the documentary film Cyberman that same year. == Cyborg tissues in engineering == Cyborg tissues structured with carbon nanotubes and plan

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