Is google (finally) stemming Urdu? The last time I checked, there were doing something like a transliteration based search but in the screenshot below, you can see that searching for the phrase ان پڑھ چٹا shows some stemming is being used. Does anyone know anything?  Oh, and while I’m on this topic, I would also like to know why is it called چٹا ان پڑھ ?

During my M.Phil. course, one of the tasks was to build a basic QA system and extend it however we liked. We used the TREC 8 dataset for evaluations. While building the system, I evaluated how current search engines (read Google) performed on this task. For this, I just queried the exact question and used the summaries of the top five results as answers. Evaluating at that time (2008), I got a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) score of 0.212 over 198 questions. 156 questions had no answers found in top 5 responses.

This term, I am demonstrating for the same task. Demonstrators are usually PhD students who provide help and guidance to junior students. For pure geek fun and lack of better things to do while taking a break, I decided to quickly jolt down a JavaScript (read  JQuery ) based QA system. This time,  the resulting MRR score over 198 questions was 0.384 while only 79 questions had no answers found in top 5 responses.

The results show clearly that during the last two years, Google has significantly improved on answering NLP queries. In fact (IIRC), my baseline system back in 2008 (based on RMRS based matching of sentences from the top 100 documents returned by an IR system) could only achieve an MRR score of approximately 0.290, showing that the current results are much better than that baseline. I hope this decade sees some more developments/improvements in QA systems and I can ask a system What do you get if you multiply six by nine?

I’ve always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe. ~Arthur Dent

How are you?
آپ کیسی ہیں؟

(Thanks to عزت مآب جناب آغا علی رضا قزلباش رحمتہ اللہ علیہ who graciously sent me his term report on Hindi to Urdu transliteration, from where I’ve copied (and modified) the character mapping.)

It can be used in Urdu too,

we get the Hindi translation

यह उर्दू में इस्तेमाल किया जा सकता है

and the Roman transliteration of the Hindi translation

 yaha urdū mēṁ istēmāla kiyā jā sakatā hai.

If you notice the first word, it should have been transliterated to “yeh”. Instead, we get a phonetic transliteration which is made up of two letters ya and ha. Transliteration from Hindi to Urdu directly would have avoided that error. There’s a nice paper titled “Hindi to Urdu Conversion: Beyond Simple Transliteration”  which lists problems faced in simple character-to-character transliteration fromm Hindi to Urdu. Whenever I get some time, I’ll try to cook some javascript code quickly. Until then, the idea is open. Any takers?

Here’s how it works.

1. downloads all status information in a directory
2. extracts the status message lines
3. does some regex magic and filters stop words like the, a, an etc. ( haven’t  seen this done earlier anywhere but the join command comes in handy for processing stopwords)
4. displays the top 10 most frequent words (and emoticons)

Twitter assigns a limit to the number of messages that you can download (3200). Also, the twitter id timeline has to be public for this script to work. All you need to do is download the script file and stop word list, keep them in the same directory, run it with the twitter id in the command line and you’ll get the list of words with the frequency at the start of each line. For example,

$ ./tword.sh barackobama
161 watch
119 live
92 http://mybarackobamacom/livestream
81 health
63 reform
55 today
52 rally
48 #hc09
47 &
38 vote

The script takes time to complete so be patient. As you may have noticed, there are still html tags inside. You can remove them by piping in any html2text program. There’s a small perl script in the zipfile which does this processing. The output now brings in a new word “change”. You will, however, need to pipe this in the script after installing HTML::Entities though CPAN.

$ ./tword.sh barackobama
161 watch
119 live
92 http://mybarackobamacom/livestream
83 health
68 change
63 reform
55 today
55 rally
48 #hc09
39 vote

My list toppers as good, , time, day, twitter, read, hope, back, :p and make. I wonder if this makes me a happy person

1. !ہر چیز میزان میں، اچھی لگتی ہے (append more ridiculously childish lyrics here)
2. Warid is asking us to start using our SIMs again by uttering the spell "کھل جا SIM SIM". Not a bad techie pun even though its a bit corny.
3. Junaid Jamshed is telling us that its ok to get Lays (no ungrammatical pun intended). Apparently he has done the research himself and was ‘surprised’ to find out that they were made in Pakistan! (no really? wow! ہم کتنی ترقی کر گٰے ہیں) Also that they are 100% حلال (with all stress on ح ، حلق سے). Personally, I prefer Slanty.
4. The Prime Minister has established a new “Special Fund for Victims of Terrorism”. Perhaps its a step towards not using the three lettered acronym (IDP). I was wondering if this makes people from US and UK eligible as well.

All this happened while “Miss Recheal Goodluck” was dropping me an email telling me that she is interested in me *blush* *blush*

BBC heading gone wrong (again)

I am sure BBC Urdu never does this intentionally but every once in a while, they put up an ambiguous heading. This one, roughly translated, can either mean ‘Exhibition of students from NCA’ or ‘Exhibition by students from NCA’.

(You may NOT comment about the font problem here :> )