A Framework for Making Good Decisions — At its core, decision-making is about answering questions. Should we launch this product? Should I order take-out for dinner? Should I go on this date? These are conditional questions that reflect some number of possible futures. …

Information Retrieval with Term Frequency and TF-IDF Models — One of the core tasks in information retrieval is searching. Anyone who deals with large amounts of text data (and that’s almost all of us) knows how difficult this seemingly simple task can be. If your search term is too broad, you may find yourself sifting through an impossible quantity…

The Benefits of Learning to Write Well — Writing is humanity’s superpower — when done well, it informs, provokes, and entertains. Perhaps that is why blogging is so popular among programmers. We’re a naturally curious community and sharing knowledge is an integral part of our ethos. For the reader, the benefits of good writing are obvious. When an…

A Guide to Getting Started with Academic Literature — Natural language processing (NLP) is a complex and evolving field. Part computer science, part linguistics, part statistics — it can be a challenge deciding where to begin. …

All the Tools You Need for Your NLP Workflow — One of the great things about using Python for natural language processing (NLP) is the large ecosystem of tools and libraries. From tokenization, to machine learning, to data visualization — Python has something for every NLP task in your workflow. Of course, choosing the *right* tool isn’t always so easy…

Using Natural Language Processing to Analyze Text — The Stanford NLP Group has long been an active player in natural language processing, particularly through their well-known CoreNLP Java toolkit. Until recently though, Stanford NLP has been a less well-known player in the Python community, which is a shame since many NLP practitioners work primarily in Python. But there’s…

The Human and Business Imperatives of Deep Work — In 2016, Cal Newport introduced a new term into the business lexicon: deep work. It’s an idea that has since taken hold of disaffected knowledge workers everywhere, due in no small part to the promise that they could finally start doing what they were hired to do — create value…

Why Reading Wisely Rather than Widely is a Better Recipe for Staying Informed — Much has been made of the question about what it is to be an informed citizen. We’re instructed to “read widely,” “engage in debate”, “seek out new viewpoints,” etc. The message is clear: the more information you consume, the better informed you will be. On its face, this is reasonable…

Bro, do you even have control over your own mind? — When Charlie bit his brother’s finger, little did he know that he was unleashing a virus that would burrow into the consciousness of nearly a billion YouTube viewers. Charlie created a meme without even knowing what a meme was. Or perhaps his brother, the victim of said bite, deserves credit—after…