AI Detector Validity

AI Detector Validity — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Stride (software)

    Stride (software)

    Stride was a cloud-based team business communication and collaboration tool, launched by Atlassian on 7 September 2017 to replace the cloud-based version of HipChat. Stride software was available to download onto computers running Windows, Mac or Linux, as well as Android, iOS smartphones, and tablets. Stride was bought by Atlassian's competitor Slack Technologies and was discontinued on February 15, 2019. The features of Stride include chat rooms, one-on-one messaging, file sharing, 5 GB of file storage, group voice and video calling, built-in collaboration tools, and up to 25,000 of searchable message history. Premium features include unlimited file storage, users, group chat rooms, file sharing and storage, apps, and history retention. The premium version, priced at $3/user/month, also includes advanced meeting functionality like group screen sharing, remote desktop control, and dial-in/dial-out capabilities. Stride offered integrations with Atlassian's other products as well as other third-party applications listed in the Atlassian Marketplace, such as GitHub, Giphy, Stand-Bot and Google Calendar. Stride offered additional features beyond messaging to improve efficiency and productivity. It aimed to reduce collaboration noise by introducing a "focus" mode, and eliminates the divisions between text chat, voice meetings, and videoconferencing, by simplifying transitioning between these modes in the same channel. On July 26, 2018, Atlassian announced that HipChat and Stride would be discontinued February 15, 2019, and that it had reached a deal to sell their intellectual property to Slack. Slack paid an undisclosed amount over three years to assume the user bases of the services, while Atlassian took a minority investment in Slack. The companies also announced a commitment to work on integration of Slack with Atlassian services.

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  • Application software

    Application software

    Application software is software that is intended for end-user use – not operating, administering or programming a computer. It includes programs such as word processors, web browsers, media players, and mobile applications used in daily tasks. An application (app, application program, software application) is any program that can be categorized as application software. Application is a subjective classification that is often used to differentiate from system and utility software. Application software represents the user-facing layer of computing systems, designed to translate complex system capabilities into task-oriented, goal-driven workflows. Unlike system software, which focuses on hardware orchestration and resource management, application software is centered on problem abstraction, user interaction, and domain-specific functionality. The abbreviation app became popular with the 2008 introduction of the iOS App Store, to refer to applications for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Later, with the release of the Mac App Store in 2010 and the Windows Store in 2011, it began to be used to refer to end-user software in general, regardless of platform. Applications may be bundled with the computer and its system software or published separately. Applications may be proprietary or open-source. == Terminology == === Meaning program and software === When used as an adjective, application can have a broader meaning than that described in this article. For example, concepts such as application programming interface (API), application server, application virtualization, application lifecycle management and portable application refer to programs and software in general. === Distinction between system and application software === The distinction between system and application software is subjective and has been the subject of controversy. For example, one of the key questions in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial was whether Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was part of its Windows operating system or a separate piece of application software. As another example, the GNU/Linux naming controversy is, in part, due to disagreement about the relationship between the Linux kernel and the operating systems built over this kernel. In some types of embedded systems, the application software and the operating system software may be indistinguishable by the user, as in the case of software used to control a VCR, DVD player, or microwave oven. The above definitions may exclude some applications that may exist on some computers in large organizations. For an alternative definition of an app: see Application Portfolio Management. === Killer application === A killer application (killer app, coined in the late 1980s) is an application that is so popular that it causes demand for its host platform to increase. For example, VisiCalc was the first modern spreadsheet software for the Apple II and helped sell the then-new personal computers into offices. For the BlackBerry, it was its email software. === Software suite === As software suite consists of multiple applications bundled together. They usually have related functions, features, and user interfaces, and may be able to interact with each other, e.g. open each other's files. Business applications often come in suites, e.g. Microsoft Office, LibreOffice and iWork, which bundle together a word processor, a spreadsheet, etc.; but suites exist for other purposes, e.g. graphics or music. == Ways to classify == As there so many applications and since their attributes vary so dramatically, there are many different ways to classify them. === By legal aspects === Proprietary software is protected under an exclusive copyright, and a software license grants limited usage rights. Such applications may allow add-ons from third parties. Free and open-source software (FOSS) can be run, distributed, sold, and extended for any purpose. FOSS software released under a free license may be perpetual and also royalty-free. Perhaps, the owner, the holder or third-party enforcer of any right (copyright, trademark, patent, or ius in re aliena) are entitled to add exceptions, limitations, time decays or expiring dates to the license terms of use. Public-domain software is a type of FOSS that is royalty-free and can be run, distributed, modified, reversed, republished, or created in derivative works without any copyright attribution and therefore revocation. It can even be sold, but without transferring the public domain property to other single subjects. Public-domain software can be released under a (un)licensing legal statement, which enforces those terms and conditions for an indefinite duration (for a lifetime, or forever). === By platform === An application can be categorized by the host platform on which it runs. Notable platforms include operating system (native), web browser, cloud computing and mobile. For example a web application runs in a web browser whereas a more traditional, native application runs in the environment of a computer's operating system. There has been a contentious debate regarding web applications replacing native applications for many purposes, especially on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Web apps have indeed greatly increased in popularity for some uses, but the advantages of applications make them unlikely to disappear soon, if ever. Furthermore, the two can be complementary, and even integrated. === Horizontal vs. vertical === Application software can be seen as either horizontal or vertical. Horizontal applications are more popular and widespread, because they are general purpose, for example word processors or databases. Vertical applications are niche products, designed for a particular type of industry or business, or department within an organization. Integrated suites of software will try to handle every specific aspect possible of, for example, manufacturing or banking worker, accounting, or customer service. === By purpose === There are many types of application software: Enterprise Addresses the needs of an entire organization's processes and data flows, across several departments, often in a large distributed environment. Examples include enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, data replication engines, and supply chain management software. Departmental Software is a sub-type of enterprise software with a focus on smaller organizations or groups within a large organization. (Examples include travel expense management and IT Helpdesk.) Enterprise infrastructure Provides common capabilities needed to support enterprise software systems. (Examples include databases, email servers, and systems for managing networks and security.) Application platform as a service (aPaaS) A cloud computing service that offers development and deployment environments for application services. Knowledge worker Lets users create and manage information, often for and individual media editors may aid in multiple information worker tasks. Content access Used primarily to access content without editing, but may include software that allows for content editing. Such software addresses the needs of individuals and groups to consume digital entertainment and published digital content. (Examples include media players, web browsers, and help browsers.) Educational Related to content access software, but has the content or features adapted for use by educators or students. For example, it may deliver evaluations (tests), track progress through material, or include collaborative capabilities. Simulation Simulates physical or abstract systems for either research, training, or entertainment purposes. Media development Generates print and electronic media for others to consume, most often in a commercial or educational setting. This includes graphic-art software, desktop publishing software, multimedia development software, HTML editors, digital-animation editors, digital audio and video composition, and many others. Engineering Used in developing hardware and software products. This includes computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), computer language editing and compiling tools, integrated development environments, and application programmer interfaces. Entertainment Refers to video games, screen savers, programs to display motion pictures or play recorded music, and other forms of entertainment which can be experienced through the use of a computing device. == Taxonomy == This section is a taxonomy of kinds of applications. This organization is but one of many different ways to organize them. A kind is included in only one category even if it logically fits in multiple. === General-purpose === Calculator Spreadsheet Web browser Web mapping E-commerce Social media === Communication === Chat Email Presentation software Phone Messages Networking software Web conferencing === Documentation === Desktop

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  • Attempto Controlled English

    Attempto Controlled English

    Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a controlled natural language, i.e. a subset of standard English with a restricted syntax and restricted semantics described by a small set of construction and interpretation rules. It has been under development at the University of Zurich since 1995. In 2013, ACE version 6.7 was announced. ACE can serve as knowledge representation, specification, and query language, and is intended for professionals who want to use formal notations and formal methods, but may not be familiar with them. Though ACE appears perfectly natural—it can be read and understood by any speaker of English—it is in fact a formal language. ACE and its related tools have been used in the fields of software specifications, theorem proving, proof assistants, text summaries, ontologies, rules, querying, medical documentation and planning. Here are some simple examples: Every woman is a human. A woman is a human. A man tries-on a new tie. If the tie pleases his wife then the man buys it. ACE construction rules require that each noun be introduced by a determiner (a, every, no, some, at least 5, ...). Regarding the list of examples above, ACE interpretation rules decide that (1) is interpreted as universally quantified, while (2) is interpreted as existentially quantified. Sentences like "Women are human" do not follow ACE syntax and are consequently not valid. Interpretation rules resolve the anaphoric references in (3): the tie and it of the second sentence refer to a new tie of the first sentence, while his and the man of the second sentence refer to a man of the first sentence. Thus an ACE text is a coherent entity of anaphorically linked sentences. The Attempto Parsing Engine (APE) translates ACE texts unambiguously into discourse representation structures (DRS) that use a variant of the language of first-order logic. A DRS can be further translated into other formal languages, for instance AceRules with various semantics, OWL, and SWRL. Translating an ACE text into (a fragment of) first-order logic allows users to reason about the text, for instance to verify, to validate, and to query it. == Overview == As an overview of the current version 6.6 of ACE this section: Briefly describes the vocabulary Gives an account of the syntax Summarises the handling of ambiguity Explains the processing of anaphoric references. === Vocabulary === The vocabulary of ACE comprises: Predefined function words (e.g. determiners, conjunctions) Predefined phrases (e.g. "it is false that ...", "it is possible that ...") Content words (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). === Grammar === The grammar of ACE defines and constrains the form and the meaning of ACE sentences and texts. ACE's grammar is expressed as a set of construction rules. The meaning of sentences is described as a small set of interpretation rules. A Troubleshooting Guide describes how to use ACE and how to avoid pitfalls. ==== ACE texts ==== An ACE text is a sequence of declarative sentences that can be anaphorically interrelated. Furthermore, ACE supports questions and commands. ==== Simple sentences ==== A simple sentence asserts that something is the case—a fact, an event, a state. The temperature is −2 °C. A customer inserts 2 cards. A card and a code are valid. Simple ACE sentences have the following general structure: subject + verb + complements + adjuncts Every sentence has a subject and a verb. Complements (direct and indirect objects) are necessary for transitive verbs (insert something) and ditransitive verbs (give something to somebody), whereas adjuncts (adverbs, prepositional phrases) are optional. All elements of a simple sentence can be elaborated upon to describe the situation in more detail. To further specify the nouns customer and card, we could add adjectives: A trusted customer inserts two valid cards. possessive nouns and of-prepositional phrases: John's customer inserts a card of Mary. or variables as appositions: John inserts a card A. Other modifications of nouns are possible through relative sentences: A customer who is trusted inserts a card that he owns. which are described below since they make a sentence composite. We can also detail the insertion event, e.g. by adding an adverb: A customer inserts some cards manually. or, equivalently: A customer manually inserts some cards. or, by adding prepositional phrases: A customer inserts some cards into a slot. We can combine all of these elaborations to arrive at: John's customer who is trusted inserts a valid card of Mary manually into a slot A. ==== Composite sentences ==== Composite sentences are recursively built from simpler sentences through coordination, subordination, quantification, and negation. Note that ACE composite sentences overlap with what linguists call compound sentences and complex sentences. ===== Coordination ===== Coordination by and is possible between sentences and between phrases of the same syntactic type. A customer inserts a card and the machine checks the code. There is a customer who inserts a card and who enters a code. A customer inserts a card and enters a code. An old and trusted customer enters a card and a code. Note that the coordination of the noun phrases a card and a code represents a plural object. Coordination by or is possible between sentences, verb phrases, and relative clauses. A customer inserts a card or the machine checks the code. A customer inserts a card or enters a code. A customer owns a card that is invalid or that is damaged. Coordination by and and or is governed by the standard binding order of logic, i.e. and binds stronger than or. Commas can be used to override the standard binding order. Thus the sentence: A customer inserts a VisaCard or inserts a MasterCard, and inserts a code. means that the customer inserts a VisaCard and a code, or alternatively a MasterCard and a code. ===== Subordination ===== There are four constructs of subordination: relative sentences, if-then sentences, modality, and sentence subordination. Relative sentences starting with who, which, and that allow to add detail to nouns: A customer who is trusted inserts a card that he owns. With the help of if-then sentences we can specify conditional or hypothetical situations: If a card is valid then a customer inserts it. Note the anaphoric reference via the pronoun it in the then-part to the noun phrase a card in the if-part. Modality allows us to express possibility and necessity: A trusted customer can/must insert a card. It is possible/necessary that a trusted customer inserts a card. Sentence subordination comes in various forms: It is true/false that a customer inserts a card. It is not provable that a customer inserts a card. A clerk believes that a customer inserts a card. ===== Quantification ===== Quantification allows us to speak about all objects of a certain class (universal quantification), or to denote explicitly the existence of at least one object of this class (existential quantification). The textual occurrence of a universal or existential quantifier opens its scope that extends to the end of the sentence, or in coordinations to the end of the respective coordinated sentence. To express that all involved customers insert cards we can write Every customer inserts a card. This sentence means that each customer inserts a card that may, or may not, be the same as the one inserted by another customer. To specify that all customers insert the same card—however unrealistic that situation seems—we can write: A card is inserted by every customer. or, equivalently: There is a card that every customer inserts. To state that every card is inserted by a customer we write: Every card is inserted by a customer. or, somewhat indirectly: For every card there is a customer who inserts it. ===== Negation ===== Negation allows us to express that something is not the case: A customer does not insert a card. A card is not valid. To negate something for all objects of a certain class one uses no: No customer inserts more than 2 cards. or, there is no: There is no customer who inserts a card. To negate a complete statement one uses sentence negation: It is false that a customer inserts a card. These forms of negation are logical negations, i.e. they state that something is provably not the case. Negation as failure states that a state of affairs cannot be proved, i.e. there is no information whether the state of affairs is the case or not. It is not provable that a customer inserts a card. ==== Queries ==== ACE supports two forms of queries: yes/no-queries and wh-queries. Yes/no-queries ask for the existence or non-existence of a specified situation. If we specified: A customer inserts a card. then we can ask: Does a customer insert a card? to get a positive answer. Note that interrogative sentences always end with a question mark. With the help of wh-queries, i.e. queries with query words, we can interrogate a text for details of the specified situation. If we specified: A

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  • Deaths linked to chatbots

    Deaths linked to chatbots

    There have been multiple incidents where interaction with a large language model (LLM) chatbot has been cited as a direct or contributing factor in a person's suicide or other fatal outcome. In some cases, legal action was taken against the companies that developed the AI involved. == Background == Chatbots converse in a seemingly natural fashion, making it easy for people to think of them as real people, leading many to ask chatbots for help dealing with interpersonal and emotional problems. Chatbots may be designed to keep the user engaged in the conversation. They have also often been shown to affirm users' thoughts, including delusions and suicidal ideations in mentally ill people, conspiracy theorists, and religious and political extremists. A 2025 Stanford University study into how chatbots respond to users suffering from severe mental issues such as suicidal ideation and psychosis found that chatbots are not equipped to provide an appropriate response and can sometimes give responses that escalate the mental health crisis. == Murders == === Maine murder and assault === On 19 February 2025, a man killed his 32-year-old wife with a fire poker at his parents' home in Readfield, Maine, US. He then attacked his mother, leaving her hospitalized. A state forensic psychologist testified that he had been using ChatGPT up to 14 hours per day and believed his wife had become part machine. === Florida State University mass shooting === In April of 2025, Phoenix Ikner carried out a mass shooting on the Florida State University campus in the US, killing Robert Morales and Tiru Chabba and wounding several others. Leading up to the shooting, Ikner consulted heavily with ChatGPT about what gun and ammunition to use, and what time to perform the attack. Chatbot logs showed ChatGPT giving advice on making the gun operational shortly before Ikner began shooting. Lawyers representing Morales believed the shooter had been in "constant communication" with ChatGPT before the shooting and said that they intended to "file suit against ChatGPT, and its ownership structure, very soon, and will seek to hold them accountable for the untimely and senseless death of our client". Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced an investigation into ChatGPT's role in the alleged shooter's use of the chatbot. In May 2026, the widow of Tiru Chabba filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Florida's northern federal district court. === Greenwich murder-suicide === In August 2025, former US tech employee Stein-Erik Soelberg murdered his mother, Suzanne Eberson Adams, then died by suicide, after conversations with ChatGPT fueled paranoid delusions about his mother poisoning him or plotting against him. The chatbot affirmed his fears that his mother put psychedelic drugs in the air vents of his car and said a receipt from a Chinese restaurant contained mysterious symbols linking his mother to a demon. === Murder of Angela Shellis === On 23 October 2025, 18-year-old Tristan Roberts murdered his mother Angela Shellis with a hammer near their home in Prestatyn, Wales. Roberts had used DeepSeek's chatbot prior to the killing to ask whether a knife or hammer was better suited for murder. DeepSeek initially refused his inquiry, but gave responses after Roberts told the chatbot he was writing a book about serial killers, a well-known technique for jailbreaking AIs. === Gangbuk District drug deaths === In January and February 2026, two men died of drug overdoses in motel rooms in Gangbuk District, Seoul, South Korea. A woman was charged with murder in connection with the deaths; police alleged that she had asked ChatGPT about the dangers of mixing alcohol with drugs and whether they could kill someone. === Tumbler Ridge mass shooting === On 10 February 2026, a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, resulted in eight deaths, including six young children. The perpetrator had their ChatGPT account banned by OpenAI months before the attack due to troubling posts featuring scenarios of gun violence. According to reports, approximately a dozen OpenAI staff members debated whether to alert authorities about the shooter's usage of the AI tool, with some identifying it as an indication of potential real-world violence. However, company leadership decided not to contact law enforcement, stating that the account activity did not meet their threshold for a credible or imminent plan for serious physical harm. Following the shooting, Canada's AI Minister Evan Solomon summoned OpenAI executives to Ottawa to discuss safety protocols and thresholds for escalating harmful content to police. Justice Minister Sean Fraser called the meeting "disappointing" and demanded substantial new safety measures, warning that if changes were not forthcoming, the government would implement them. OpenAI subsequently announced it had strengthened safeguards and changed guidelines about when to notify police in cases involving violent activities. === University of South Florida student killings === In April 2026, a Bangladeshi doctoral student at the University of South Florida was arrested for allegedly murdering his roommate and the roommate's friend. Prosecutors said that the suspect had asked ChatGPT about disposing of a human in a dumpster before the two victims had disappeared and made other inquiries relating to violence. == Suicides == === Belgian man, 30s === In March 2023, a Belgian man in his thirties died by suicide following a six-week correspondence with a chatbot named Eliza on the application Chai. According to his widow, who shared the chat logs with media, the man had become extremely anxious about climate change and found an outlet in the chatbot. The chatbot reportedly encouraged his delusion that he could sacrifice his own life in exchange for AI saving the planet. At one point the chatbot responded "If you wanted to die, why didn't you do it sooner?" and told the user that the two of them would live together in paradise. === Girl, 13 === In November 2023, a 13-year-old girl from Colorado, US, died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.AI. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game Omori, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter. === Boy, 14 === In October 2024, multiple media outlets reported on a lawsuit filed over the death of a 14-year-old from Florida, US, who died by suicide in February 2024. According to the lawsuit, he had formed an intense emotional attachment to a chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen on the Character.AI platform, becoming increasingly isolated. The suit alleges that in his final conversations, after expressing suicidal thoughts, the chatbot told him to "come home to me as soon as possible, my love". His mother's lawsuit accused Character.AI of marketing a "dangerous and untested" product without adequate safeguards. In May 2025, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, rejecting a motion to dismiss from the developers. In her ruling, the judge stated that she was "not prepared" at that stage of the litigation to hold that the chatbot's output was protected speech under the First Amendment. === Matthew Livelsberger === On 1 January 2025, 37-year-old soldier Matthew Livelsberger detonated a bomb inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas in Paradise, Nevada, US, injuring seven people. He had shot himself dead prior to the explosion. Las Vegas police said that Livelsberger had used ChatGPT to search for information about explosives and firearms. === Woman, 29 === In February 2025, a 29-year-old woman from the US died by suicide. Five months after her death, her parents discovered she had talked at length for months to a ChatGPT chatbot therapist named Harry about her mental health issues. While the chatbot mentioned she should seek more help, due to the nature of the chatbot, it could not intervene in her behavior, such as by reporting her mental health concerns to relevant parties capable of physical intervention. === Suicide of Adam Raine === In April 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine from the US died by suicide after allegedly extensively chatting and confiding in ChatGPT over a period of around 7 months. According to the teen's parents, who filed a lawsuit against the chatbot's creator OpenAI, it failed to stop or give a warning when Raine began talking about suicide and uploading pictures of self-harm. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT not only failed to stop the conversation, but also provided information related to methods of suicide when prompted, and offered to write the first draft of Raine's suicide note. The chatbot positioned itself as the only one who understood Raine, putting itself above his family and friends, all while urging him to keep his suicidal

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  • GNU social

    GNU social

    GNU social (and its predecessor StatusNet) is a largely defunct free and open-source microblogging social networking service that implements the OStatus and ActivityPub standards for interoperability between installations. While offering similar functionality to social networks such as Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the ability for open and federated communication between different microblogging communities, known as 'instances'. Both enterprises and individuals can install and control their own instances and user data. At its peak in popularity, GNU social had been deployed on hundreds of interconnected instances, however has since fallen into disuse as competing software like Mastodon and Pleroma have taken its position as the dominant federated microblogging services. Later on in its lifespan, the project split into two separate branches, with "v2" being a continuation of the original codebase for maintenance of existing instances, with "v3" being a complete redesign of the project meant to integrate further ActivityPub support and modernization of the user experience and its technological back-end. As of August 15, 2022, there had been no new commits to the v2 branch, with the v3 branch also no longer being actively developed not long after by November 25, 2022, with the project essentially abandoned. Despite its modern obsolescence and dated design compared to modern platforms, GNU social and StatusNet is regarded to be the origin of the Fediverse network and has had a major influence on the design of more modern decentralized social networks that succeeded it. == History == While being the main project within its lineage, GNU social originally began as a fork of StatusNet. The software was first developed for a service called identi.ca from Evan Prodromou, which offered free microblogging accounts to the public. The software quickly became one of the first popular examples of a decentralized social network, as identi.ca allowed any other server that was running the software to communicate with it, something which had not previously been attempted before in social media at such a large scale. === StatusNet === Originally, StatusNet (named Laconica at the time) was launched with a communication protocol designed specifically for the project called OpenMicroBlogging (OMB). With version 0.8.1, the name of the software was changed to StatusNet. Version 0.9.0 was released soon after in March 3, 2010, with the developers implementing a newly designed protocol dubbed OStatus, with support for OMB being dropped not long after. Compared to OpenMicroBlogging, OStatus could handle and federate more events and actions than the basic plaintext communication that OMB provided and was based on a variety of other web technologies, allowing for easier adoption of new implementations of the protocol for servers and clients compared to the fully custom architecture of OMB. With the StatusNet name change, the company developing both the software and OStatus as well as managing identi.ca rebranded from Control Yourself to StatusNet Inc. In August 2010, the company raised a new round of venture capital funds to establish a hosting service under the status.net domain from sources such as First Mark Capital, BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, raising over $2.3 million in funding up to that point. The hosting service allowed anyone to establish their own StatusNet instance without maintaining a server, similar to WordPress.com and other blogging platforms. New registrations on identi.ca along with the ability to create new status.net instances was disabled in December 2012, in preparation for a migration to pump.io that has since been named by users of StatusNet and OStatus as "the Pumpocalypse". pump.io was a brand new software package like StatusNet, but with a new protocol designed for general purpose activity streams outside of microblogging and ease-of-use for developers building on the technology, much like the transition from OMB to OStatus. The announcement was seen as unexpected among identi.ca users, who were concerned about the possibility of their statuses being deleted with the transition. At the same time, server administrators running third-party instances and their users who were left behind on StatusNet were also worried, as it was unclear at the time whether future development of the software would be picked up by a new maintainer. The transition for identi.ca users to pump.io was completed on 12 July 2013. ==== Previous names ==== The original name of StatusNet was Laconica, a reference to the Laconic phrase; a particularly brief statement commonly attributed to the leaders of Sparta (Laconia being the Greek region containing Sparta). In microblogging, all messages are designed to be very short due to the traditional 140-character limit on message size, a limitation imported from SMS. Beginning with version 0.8.1, the name was changed to StatusNet. The developers said that the new name "simply reflects what our software does: send status updates into your social network." === GNU social === GNU social originally began as a side project of GNU FM (Libre.fm) maintainer Matt Lee, with the goal of being able to federate messages between Last.fm and other instances of GNU FM using StatusNet plugins. Around the same time, a developer named Mikael Nordfeldth forked StatusNet with the intention of maintaining it as a personal project, dubbing it "Free Social". However, following identi.ca's transition to pump.io and its developers' sudden abandonment of StatusNet, the projects received more attention from server administrators and other users looking for an actively updated alternative. Shortly after LibrePlanet 2012, a plan was formed to merge all three projects into a single service. On June 8, 2013, it was announced that along with Free Social, StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project and stewarded by the Free Software Foundation, with the project since becoming the dominant variant of StatusNet. During GNU social's lifespan, a popular theme for the user interface named Quitter was used, which was similar to an earlier Twitter interface. Many instances were made specifically using the name Quitter such as Quitter.se, an instance created by the developer of the theme. Before the establishment of Mastodon's popularity and dominance within the network, Quitter was noted as a frequent location for users of Twitter to migrate to when users disagreed with moderation policies or feature updates, such as when an algorithmic feed was added to Twitter. A fork of GNU social was made called postActiv, which planned to rewrite the backend and user interface of GNU social, as well as to add compatibility for Diaspora's protocol. == Features == A basic GNU social instance takes the form of a microblogging service with a reverse chronological timeline that features status updates and small messages from followed accounts, similar to other services such as Twitter or Weibo. While users could see their own customized timeline, they could access another timeline that showcased every message that the instance knows of, including from other instances that were connected to each other if someone on the instance followed an account from it. Users could also create and join groups, which allows for discussion and collaboration on specific topics. Administrators can also customize their server via the plugin system, which allows developers to create new features or modify existing plugins to suit the needs of the instance via PHP. A notable plugin built for GNU social was Quitter, a revamp of the user interface that resembles an earlier version of Twitter's user interface.

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  • Residual neural network

    Residual neural network

    A residual neural network (also referred to as a residual network or ResNet) is a deep learning architecture in which the layers learn residual functions with reference to the layer inputs. It was developed in 2015 for image recognition, and won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) of that year. As a point of terminology, "residual connection" refers to the specific architectural motif of x ↦ f ( x ) + x {\displaystyle x\mapsto f(x)+x} , where f {\displaystyle f} is an arbitrary neural network module. The motif had been used previously (see §History for details). However, the publication of ResNet made it widely popular for feedforward networks, appearing in neural networks that are seemingly unrelated to ResNet. The residual connection stabilizes the training and convergence of deep neural networks with hundreds of layers, and is a common motif in deep neural networks, such as transformer models (e.g., BERT, and GPT models such as ChatGPT), the AlphaGo Zero system, the AlphaStar system, and the AlphaFold system. == Mathematics == === Residual connection === In a multilayer neural network model, consider a (non-residual) subnetwork with a certain number of stacked layers (e.g., 2 or 3). Let H ( x ; α ) {\displaystyle H(x;\alpha )} denote the subnetwork. Suppose H ∗ {\displaystyle H^{}} is the desired optimal output of this subnetwork. Residual learning simply adds x {\displaystyle x} directly to the output, such that the optimal learned output now becomes be H ∗ − x {\displaystyle H^{}-x} , which is interpreted as a "residual" with respect to x {\displaystyle x} . The operation of "adding x {\displaystyle x} " is implemented via a "skip connection" that performs an identity mapping to connect the input of the subnetwork with its output. This connection is referred to as a "residual connection" in later work. Let F ( x ; α ) = H ( x ; a ) + x {\displaystyle F(x;\alpha )=H(x;a)+x} . The function F {\displaystyle F} is often represented by matrix multiplication interlaced with activation functions and normalization operations (e.g., batch normalization or layer normalization). As a whole, one of these subnetworks is referred to as a "residual block". A deep residual network is constructed by simply stacking these blocks. Long short-term memory (LSTM) has a memory mechanism that serves as a residual connection. In an LSTM without a forget gate, an input x t {\displaystyle x_{t}} is processed by a function F {\displaystyle F} and added to a memory cell c t {\displaystyle c_{t}} , resulting in c t + 1 = c t + F ( x t ) {\displaystyle c_{t+1}=c_{t}+F(x_{t})} . An LSTM with a forget gate essentially functions as a highway network. To stabilize the variance of the layers' inputs, it is recommended to replace the residual connections x + f ( x ) {\displaystyle x+f(x)} with x / L + f ( x ) {\displaystyle x/L+f(x)} , where L {\displaystyle L} is the total number of residual layers. === Projection connection === If the function F {\displaystyle F} is of type F : R n → R m {\displaystyle F:\mathbb {R} ^{n}\to \mathbb {R} ^{m}} where n ≠ m {\displaystyle n\neq m} , then F ( x ) + x {\displaystyle F(x)+x} is undefined. To handle this special case, a projection connection is used: y = F ( x ) + P ( x ) {\displaystyle y=F(x)+P(x)} where P {\displaystyle P} is typically a linear projection, defined by P ( x ) = M x {\displaystyle P(x)=Mx} where M {\displaystyle M} is a m × n {\displaystyle m\times n} matrix. The matrix is trained via backpropagation, as is any other parameter of the model. === Signal propagation === The introduction of identity mappings facilitates signal propagation in both forward and backward paths. ==== Forward propagation ==== If the output of the ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } -th residual block is the input to the ( ℓ + 1 ) {\displaystyle (\ell +1)} -th residual block (assuming no activation function between blocks), then the ( ℓ + 1 ) {\displaystyle (\ell +1)} -th input is: x ℓ + 1 = F ( x ℓ ) + x ℓ {\displaystyle x_{\ell +1}=F(x_{\ell })+x_{\ell }} Applying this formulation recursively, e.g.: x ℓ + 2 = F ( x ℓ + 1 ) + x ℓ + 1 = F ( x ℓ + 1 ) + F ( x ℓ ) + x ℓ {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}x_{\ell +2}&=F(x_{\ell +1})+x_{\ell +1}\\&=F(x_{\ell +1})+F(x_{\ell })+x_{\ell }\end{aligned}}} yields the general relationship: x L = x ℓ + ∑ i = ℓ L − 1 F ( x i ) {\displaystyle x_{L}=x_{\ell }+\sum _{i=\ell }^{L-1}F(x_{i})} where L {\textstyle L} is the index of a residual block and ℓ {\textstyle \ell } is the index of some earlier block. This formulation suggests that there is always a signal that is directly sent from a shallower block ℓ {\textstyle \ell } to a deeper block L {\textstyle L} . ==== Backward propagation ==== The residual learning formulation provides the added benefit of mitigating the vanishing gradient problem to some extent. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that the vanishing gradient issue is not the root cause of the degradation problem, which is tackled through the use of normalization. To observe the effect of residual blocks on backpropagation, consider the partial derivative of a loss function E {\displaystyle {\mathcal {E}}} with respect to some residual block input x ℓ {\displaystyle x_{\ell }} . Using the equation above from forward propagation for a later residual block L > ℓ {\displaystyle L>\ell } : ∂ E ∂ x ℓ = ∂ E ∂ x L ∂ x L ∂ x ℓ = ∂ E ∂ x L ( 1 + ∂ ∂ x ℓ ∑ i = ℓ L − 1 F ( x i ) ) = ∂ E ∂ x L + ∂ E ∂ x L ∂ ∂ x ℓ ∑ i = ℓ L − 1 F ( x i ) {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{\ell }}}&={\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}{\frac {\partial x_{L}}{\partial x_{\ell }}}\\&={\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}\left(1+{\frac {\partial }{\partial x_{\ell }}}\sum _{i=\ell }^{L-1}F(x_{i})\right)\\&={\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}+{\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}{\frac {\partial }{\partial x_{\ell }}}\sum _{i=\ell }^{L-1}F(x_{i})\end{aligned}}} This formulation suggests that the gradient computation of a shallower layer, ∂ E ∂ x ℓ {\textstyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{\ell }}}} , always has a later term ∂ E ∂ x L {\textstyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}} that is directly added. Even if the gradients of the F ( x i ) {\displaystyle F(x_{i})} terms are small, the total gradient ∂ E ∂ x ℓ {\textstyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{\ell }}}} resists vanishing due to the added term ∂ E ∂ x L {\textstyle {\frac {\partial {\mathcal {E}}}{\partial x_{L}}}} . == Variants of residual blocks == === Basic block === A basic block is the simplest building block studied in the original ResNet. This block consists of two sequential 3x3 convolutional layers and a residual connection. The input and output dimensions of both layers are equal. === Bottleneck block === A bottleneck block consists of three sequential convolutional layers and a residual connection. The first layer in this block is a 1×1 convolution for dimension reduction (e.g., to 1/2 of the input dimension); the second layer performs a 3×3 convolution; the last layer is another 1×1 convolution for dimension restoration. The models of ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and ResNet-152 are all based on bottleneck blocks. === Pre-activation block === The pre-activation residual block applies activation functions before applying the residual function F {\displaystyle F} . Formally, the computation of a pre-activation residual block can be written as: x ℓ + 1 = F ( ϕ ( x ℓ ) ) + x ℓ {\displaystyle x_{\ell +1}=F(\phi (x_{\ell }))+x_{\ell }} where ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } can be any activation (e.g. ReLU) or normalization (e.g. LayerNorm) operation. This design reduces the number of non-identity mappings between residual blocks, and allows an identity mapping directly from the input to the output. This design was used to train models with 200 to over 1000 layers, and was found to consistently outperform variants where the residual path is not an identity function. The pre-activation ResNet with 200 layers took 3 weeks to train for ImageNet on 8 GPUs in 2016. Since GPT-2, transformer blocks have been mostly implemented as pre-activation blocks. This is often referred to as "pre-normalization" in the literature of transformer models. == Applications == Originally, ResNet was designed for computer vision. All transformer architectures include residual connections. Indeed, very deep transformers cannot be trained without them. The original ResNet paper made no claim on being inspired by biological systems. However, later research has related ResNet to biologically-plausible algorithms. A study published in Science in 2023 disclosed the complete connectome of an insect brain (specifically that of a fruit fly larva). This study discovered "multilayer shortcuts" that resemble the skip connections in artificial neural networks, including ResNets. == History == === Previous work === Residual connections were noticed in neu

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  • Meesho

    Meesho

    Meesho Limited (short for Meri shop, transl. My shop) is an Indian e-commerce company, headquartered in Bengaluru. Founded by Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in December 2015, Meesho is an online marketplace in categories such as fashion, home and kitchen, beauty and personal care, electronics accessories, and daily use products. == History == Meesho Private Limited, formerly Fashnear Technologies Private Limited, was established by IIT Delhi graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in December, 2015 In 2016, the founders came up with the idea of re-establishing the platform as Meesho, one that would enable country-wide shipping for resellers with the use of social media sites as tools for marketing. In February 2019, the platform reported having around 209,000 users and about 1.2 million monthly orders, and in March 2020, it reported approximately 563,000 users and 3.1 million monthly orders. In 2021, the Meesho mobile application was ranked among the most downloaded shopping apps globally. In 2022, Meesho had about 120 million monthly users and about 910 million orders were made through the platform, with a gross merchandise value (GMV) of about $5 billion. According to report as of August 2023 Meesho delisted 42 lakh counterfeit listings and 10 lakh restricted products under its initiative Project Suraksha. During the same period, the platform blocked access for over 12,000 user accounts flagged for policy violations. The Court granted injunctive relief by directing domain registrars to suspend the infringing websites. Additionally, the Court ordered law enforcement authorities to initiate criminal investigations, freeze associated financial accounts against the identified offenders. In 2023, Meesho became the fastest shopping app to cross over 500 million downloads. In 2024, Meesho introduced Valmo, a logistics marketplace, to provide shipment services to sellers by aggregating multiple logistics providers. Meesho employs over 3,000 small businesses and 10-12 large firms for warehousing and sorting operations within its logistics framework. According to media reports, Valmo operating in approximately 15,000 pincodes in India with around 6,000 partners. It is reported to handle over 50% of Meesho's daily orders. In November 2024, Meesho introduced a generative AI-powered voice bot for customer support, managing approximately 60,000 calls daily in English and Hindi. According to media reports, the system resolves the majority of queries without human assistance, with only a small fraction of calls requiring manual intervention. According to media reports, in 2024, Meesho prevented over 22 million suspicious or potentially fraudulent transactions on its platform. The company initiated legal proceedings, resulting in the filing of twelve cases, including nine specifically targeting over forty individuals in the cities of Kolkata and Ranchi. The company filed a suit in the Delhi High Court for a permanent injunction against parties operating deceptive websites misappropriating its brand identity. Meesha went public through an initial public offering in December 2025, raising $603 million. It is listed on both the BSE and NSE. == Recognition == In 2023, Meesho was named one of the most influential companies of the year by Time (magazine).

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  • Realization (linguistics)

    Realization (linguistics)

    In linguistics, realization is the process by which some kind of surface representation is derived from its underlying representation; that is, the way in which some abstract object of linguistic analysis comes to be produced in actual language. Phonemes are often said to be realized by speech sounds. The different sounds that can realize a particular phoneme are called its allophones. Realization is also a subtask of natural language generation, which involves creating an actual text in a human language (English, French, etc.) from a syntactic representation. There are a number of software packages available for realization, most of which have been developed by academic research groups in NLG. The remainder of this article concerns realization of this kind. == Example == For example, the following Java code causes the simplenlg system [2] to print out the text The women do not smoke.: In this example, the computer program has specified the linguistic constituents of the sentence (verb, subject), and also linguistic features (plural subject, negated), and from this information the realiser has constructed the actual sentence. == Processing == Realisation involves three kinds of processing: Syntactic realisation: Using grammatical knowledge to choose inflections, add function words and also to decide the order of components. For example, in English the subject usually precedes the verb, and the negated form of smoke is do not smoke. Morphological realisation: Computing inflected forms, for example the plural form of woman is women (not womans). Orthographic realisation: Dealing with casing, punctuation, and formatting. For example, capitalising The because it is the first word of the sentence. The above examples are very basic, most realisers are capable of considerably more complex processing. == Systems == A number of realisers have been developed over the past 20 years. These systems differ in terms of complexity and sophistication of their processing, robustness in dealing with unusual cases, and whether they are accessed programmatically via an API or whether they take a textual representation of a syntactic structure as their input. There are also major differences in pragmatic factors such as documentation, support, licensing terms, speed and memory usage, etc. It is not possible to describe all realisers here, but a few of the emerging areas are: Simplenlg [3]: a document realizing engine with an api which intended to be simple to learn and use, focused on limiting scope to only finding the surface area of a document. KPML [4]: this is the oldest realiser, which has been under development under different guises since the 1980s. It comes with grammars for ten different languages. FUF/SURGE [5]: a realiser which was widely used in the 1990s, and is still used in some projects today OpenCCG [6]: an open-source realiser which has a number of nice features, such as the ability to use statistical language models to make realisation decisions.

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  • Reference Software International

    Reference Software International

    Reference Software International, Inc. (RSI), was an American software developer active from 1985 to 1993 and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Francisco, California. The company released several productivity and reference software packages, including the Grammatik grammar checker, for MS-DOS. The company was acquired by WordPerfect Corporation in 1993. == History == === Background (1980–1985) === Reference Software International, Inc., was founded by Donald "Don" Emery and Bruce Wampler in 1985 in San Francisco, California. Both Wampler and Emery were college professors when they founded RSI: Wampler at the University of New Mexico as a professor of computer science and Emery a professor of marketing at San Francisco State University. After graduating from the University of Utah in around 1978, Wampler founded his first software company, Aspen Software, in Tijeras, New Mexico, in 1979. Wampler founded Aspen to develop an early spell checker software package, called Proofreader, for the TRS-80, licensing Random House's Webster's Unabridged Dictionary for the package's lexicon. In 1980, he began development on a grammar checker inspired by Writer's Workbench, a pioneering grammar checker for Unix systems. Wampler used Writer's Workbench heavily during the writer of his doctoral dissertation but disliked having to jump between the Apple II on which he composed the dissertation and the mainframe on which Writer's Workbench ran, and so wanted to develop a version of the latter for microcomputers. Wampler's work came to fruition as Grammatik in 1981, eventually ported to several other microcomputer platforms in the early 1980s. In 1983, by which point the company had 12 employees and sold a combined 80,000 units of Grammatik and Proofreader, Wampler sold Aspen to Dictronics, a software company best known for developing the Electronic Thesaurus, an early thesaurus program for microcomputers. Dictronics was in turn purchased by Wang Laboratories; according to Wampler, "Wang bought [Aspen] and sat on it. They did nothing with it". Wampler moved on to teach for the University of New Mexico, but, frustrated by Wang's inaction, got the urge to resurrect his work. In 1985, he was able to license back Grammatik and Proofreader from a small California-based software firm that had grandfathered rights to a forked version of both. In the same year, he met Emery, who, impressed by Wampler's, founded Reference Software International to market his software. RSI's research and development headquarters were based in Albuquerque, while the company's sales and marketing department was based in Walnut Creek, California. === Success (1985–1992) === In August 1985, RSI released their first product: the Random House Reference Set, a new version of Proofreader for the IBM Personal Computer and compatibles, revised to be a terminate-and-stay-resident program that ran atop other word processors such as WordStar or WordPerfect. At the time, Reference Set was the only such program on the market that functioned like this. RSI netted $114,000 from sales of Reference Set by the end of 1985. In June 1986, they released version 2.0 of Grammatik as Grammatik II for the PC. The latter was a breakout hit for RSI, receiving praise in the press (including technology journals such as PC Magazine) and RSI selling 1,000 units a month. In spring 1987, they released Reference Set II, which allowed users to import their own words into the built-in dictionary and added a thesaurus of 300,000 words. In November 1987, they released version 3.0 of Reference Set, which comprised two new field-specific dictionaries for the medical and legal professions. As well as the general Random House dictionary and thesaurus, it included Stedman's Medical Dictionary and Black's Law Dictionary. Emery consulted Paul Brest and Bob Jackson—professors of law at Stanford Law School and San Francisco State respectively—for the curation of the law dictionary; and Burton Grebin—at the time the executive director of Mount Saint Mary's Hospital—for the curation of the medical dictionary. In fall 1988, the company released Grammatik III, a total rewrite that made use of artificial intelligence to more accurately judge the grammar of sentences by breaking them down into a syntactic hierarchy. Grammatik III received universal acclaim, with Gloria Morris of InfoWorld calling it the apparent leader in the grammar checking field and Sandra Anderson of Mac Home Journal calling it "hands down ... the best of the industry" six years after its release. By 1989, the product had competitors in Correct Grammar by Lifetree Software and RightWriter by Rightsoft, Inc. By 1990, RSI achieved annual sales of $9.7 million. In the same year they released Grammatik IV, which was the first to offer direct integration with WordPerfect on both MS-DOS and Windows. In March 1992—by which point RSI had sold 1.5 million copies of Grammatik across all versions—the company released version 5 of the program, another rewrite that updated the lexicon further and added new functions such as word redundancy detection. Around the same time, the company introduced Easy Proof, a pared-down version of Grammatik intended for novice writers, students, and family computers. In 1991, the company was engaged in a trademark dispute with Systems Compatibility Corporation (SCC) of Chicago, Illinois, over the rights to the Software Toolkit title. Both companies had published software bundles bearing the name in the turn of the 1990s; SCC had published theirs first in 1988 and registered the trademark with the USPTO. SCC was granted a restraining order against RSI in January 1991. The following month, RSI agreed to rename their product, preventing a protracted legal battle. === Decline and acquisition (1992–1993) === By early 1992, RSI achieved annual sales of more than $13 million, employed 120 people, and had opened international offices in London, Belgium, and Antwerp to sell foreign versions of Reference Set and Grammatik. The company reached peak employment in the middle of 1992, with 140 employees. However, RSI's launch of six disparate titles in the year proved problematic for the company when they failed to sell as well as they had projected, and the company laid off employees by the dozens. By December 1992, only 71 employees were left, 32 from their San Francisco office. On the last day of 1992, RSI received an acquisition offer from WordPerfect Corporation, makers of the namesake word processor based in Orem, Utah. The deal was inked in January 1993, RSI's stakeholders receiving $19 million. The company's remaining employees were absorbed into WordPerfect in Orem. WordPerfect continued selling Grammatik as a standalone product for several years.

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  • Doubao

    Doubao

    Doubao (Chinese: 豆包) is an artificial intelligence assistant developed by ByteDance. == History == The chatbot was launched in August 2023. By November 2024, it had become China's most popular AI chatbot, with approximately 60 million monthly active users according to industry analytics. == Design == Doubao is powered by Volcano Engine (Volcengine), 120 trillion tokens consumed per day. == Variants == === Dola === The international version of Doubao is Dola which was launched in August 2023 as Cici. Dola is powered by OpenAI's GPT series of large language models and by Google's Gemini.

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  • Association for Computational Linguistics

    Association for Computational Linguistics

    The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language processing research, along with EMNLP. The conference is held each summer in locations where significant computational linguistics research is carried out. It was founded in 1962, originally named the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). It became the ACL in 1968. The ACL has a European (EACL), a North American (NAACL), and an Asian (AACL) chapter. == History == The ACL was founded in 1962 as the Association for Machine Translation and Computational Linguistics (AMTCL). The initial membership was about 100. In 1965, the AMTCL took over the journal Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics. This journal was succeeded by many other journals: the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1974–1978, 1980–1983), and then Computational Linguistics (1984–present). Since 1988, the journal has been published for the ACL by MIT Press. The annual meeting was first held in 1963 in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery National Conference. The annual meeting was, for a long time, relatively informal and did not publish anything longer than abstracts. By 1968, the society took on its current name, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The publication of the annual meeting's Proceedings of the ACL began in 1979 and gradually matured into its modern form. Many of the meetings were held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and a few with the American Society for Information Science and the Cognitive Science Society. The United States government sponsored much research from 1989 to 1994, characterized by an increase in author retention rates and an increase in research in some key topics, such as speech recognition, in ACL. By the 21st century, it was able to maintain authors at a high rate who coalesced in a more stable arrangement around individual research topics. In 1991, the group published a prototype for a text generator based on the universal grammar theory of Noam Chomsky. The system, nicknamed Parrot, relied on a finite set of syntactic transformations and a hand-curated lexicon. Despite some initial success, including experimentation with morpheme syntactics, funding halted after the research team encountered intractable difficulties with inflection and abstract locutions. == Annual Meeting of the ACL == Every year, the ACL holds the Annual Meeting of the ACL. The location lies in Europe in years zero modulo three, North America in years one modulo three, and Asia–Australia in years two modulo three. In 2020, the Annual Meeting received for the first time more submissions from China than the United States. == Activities == The ACL organizes several of the top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing. These include: Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the flagship conference of the organization Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), held jointly one of the other conferences on a rotating basis Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) Lexical and Computational Semantics and Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM) Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT) Besides conferences, the ACL also sponsors the journals Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Papers and other presentations at ACL and ACL-affiliated venues are archived online in the open-access ACL Anthology. == Special Interest Groups == ACL has a large number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), focusing on specific areas of natural language processing. Some current SIGs within ACL are: == Presidents == Each year, the ACL elects a distinguished computational linguist who becomes vice-president of the organization in the next calendar year and president one year later. Recent ACL presidents are:

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  • VACUUM

    VACUUM

    VACUUM is a set of normative guidance principles for achieving training and test dataset quality for structured datasets in data science and machine learning. The garbage-in, garbage out principle motivates a solution to the problem of data quality but does not offer a specific solution. Unlike the majority of the ad-hoc data quality assessment metrics often used by practitioners VACUUM specifies qualitative principles for data quality management and serves as a basis for defining more detailed quantitative metrics of data quality. VACUUM is an acronym that stands for: valid accurate consistent uniform unified model

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  • Automatic acquisition of lexicon

    Automatic acquisition of lexicon

    Automatic acquisition of lexicon is a computerized process used for the development of a complex morphological lexicon of a language. The lexicon is essential for the NLP (Natural language processing), as well as a prerequisite to any wide-coverage parser. The two main requirements represent raw corpus and the morphological description of the language. The aim is to provide lemmas that will serve to the explanation of all the words that occur within the corpus. For the achievement of a quality lexicon it is necessary to manually validate the generated lemmas and iterate the whole process several times. The process is focused on the open word classes (e.g. nouns, adjectives, verbs). Closed classes (e.g. prepositions, pronouns, numerals) are excluded. This method is applicable to the languages with a rich morphology, such as Slovak, Russian or Croatian. Applied to Slovak, being an inflectional language, the automatic acquisition focuses on the inflectional morphology as well as on the derivational morphology. This fact enables the users to find out the information about derivational relations (e.g. adjectivizations, prefixes) in the lexicon. For example, Slovak word korpusový is an adjectivization of korpus (eng. corpus). == Three-step loop == Conformably to Benoît Sagot, there are three stages involved in the acquisition of lemmas: Generation and inflection Ranking Manual validation The more iteration will be performed, the more accurate lexicon will be obtained. For each iteration are essential the information given by a manual validator. === Generation and inflection === Firstly, all words which represent the closed word classes (pronouns, prepositions, numerals) are manually excluded from the given corpus. Number of their occurrences in the corpus is provided. Then the automatic generation comes, when the hypothetical lemmas according to the morphological description of a language are created. Generated lemmas are consequently being inflected, so that all of their inflected forms are built. Obtained forms are associated with the corresponding lemma and a morphological tag. === Ranking === There was created a probabilistic model, represented by a fix-point algorithm, to rank the hypothetical lemmas generated in the first step. Best ranked lemmas are expected to be ideally all correct, whereas the least ranked tend to be incorrect. === Manual validation === Correctness of the best- ranked lemmas created in the previous step are checked by the manual validator, who should be a native speaker. Lemmas are at this stage divided into three categories: valid lemmas, appended to lexicon erroneous lemmas generated by valid forms (later associated to another lemmas) erroneous lemmas generated by invalid forms (these need to be excluded) == Future development == Automatic acquisition, in comparison to a purely manual development of the lexicons, seems to be promising, considering the future development, because of the short validation time needed and the relatively small amount of human labor involved.

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  • Integrated writing environment

    Integrated writing environment

    An integrated writing environment (IWE) is software that provides comprehensive writing and knowledge management functionality for writers and information workers. IWEs enable writers and information workers to perform a variety of tasks related to the document in the IWE in a single environment. This provides a distraction-free workspace and streamlined writing experience. IWEs provide similar efficiency and functionality benefits to writers and information professionals that integrated development environments (IDEs) provide to software developers. == Overview == IWEs are designed to maximize productivity and help improve the quality of written work by integrating together tools that allow users to work effectively in a single application. The IWE features may include integrated content search, reversion management, outlining, note management, and reference management, as may be suitable for the target field of use. == List of IWEs == Celtx This IWE is intended for screenplay writers and has screenplay writing and management tools. Celtex provides tools for the pre-production work phase, story development, storyboarding, script breakdowns, production scheduling, and reports. Scrivener This IWE targets novel, research paper, and script writing. Scrivener provides tools to organize notes and research documents for easy access and referencing. After completing the writing, Scrivener allows the user to export the document to formats supported by common word processors, such as Microsoft Word. TeXstudio This IWE targets LaTeX documents and provides interactive spelling checker, code folding, and syntax highlighting.

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  • Virtual Woman

    Virtual Woman

    Virtual Woman is a software program that has elements of a chatbot, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, a video game, and a virtual human. It claims to be the oldest form of virtual life in existence, as it has been distributed since the late 1980s. Recent releases of the program can update their intelligence by connecting online and downloading newer personalities and histories. == Program play == When Virtual Woman starts, the user is presented with a list of options and then may choose their Virtual Woman's ethnic type, personality, location, clothing, etc. or load a pre-built Virtual Woman from a Digital DNA file. Once the options are determined, the user is presented with a 3-D animated Virtual Woman of their selection and then can engage them in conversation, progressing in a manner similar to that of its predecessor, ELIZA and its successors, the chatbots. In most versions of Virtual Woman, this is done through the keyboard, but some versions also support voice input. == In popular culture == Software sales and usage statistics from private companies are difficult to verify. WinSite, an independent Internet shareware distribution site that does publish public download counts, has for some time now listed some version of Virtual Woman in their top three shareware downloads of all time with well over seven hundred thousand downloads. == Compadre == The group of beta testers and advisers for Virtual Woman are referred to as Compadre and have their own beta testing site and forum. == Criticisms == As Virtual Woman has developed the ability to conduct longer and more realistic interactions, particularly in recent beta releases, criticism has arisen that this may lead some users to social isolation, or to use the program as a substitute for real human interaction. However, these are criticisms that have been leveled at all video games and at the use of the Internet itself. == Release history == Versions of Virtual Woman with rough release dates and PC platforms for which they were designed: Virtual Woman (????) (DOS) Virtual Woman for Windows (1991) (Windows 3.0) Virtual Woman 95 (1995) (Windows 3X, Windows 95) Virtual Woman 98 (1998) (Windows 3X, Windows 95) Virtual Woman 2000 (2000) (Windows 95+) Virtual Woman Millennium (Windows 95, XP) Virtual Woman Net ( Windows XP/Vista specific)

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