web

Last night, I took a look at the federal budget for 2012-2013. Apparently we will be spending about 25% in “Servicing of Domestic Debt”. Take a more detailed look here

With the increasing number of “opinion-dispensing apps” which enable Urdu users to write in Unicode out there on the web, there is (or will soon be) a need for getting some meaningful statistics out of the ever-present sentiment of the masses (or at least the web-savvy subset). This calls for resources which enable automatic processing of sentiment, one of which is a sentiment lexicon for Urdu. (For people uninitiated in computational linguistics, a lexicon is just a list of words)....

Twitter API has changed a bit so this post had to be updated. Check the updated post here Topic modelling means detecting “abstract” topics from a collection of text documents. The most common text book technique to do that is using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Simply put, LDA is a statistical algorithm which takes documents as input and produces a list of topics. One catch is that you have to tell it how many topics you want....

In my last post, I highlighted some problems that I face daily while using twitter in Urdu as well in English. A few days ago, I decided to experiment with the Twitter API and write my own client to fix some of these problems. You can see the result at www.twingual.com. It is a javascript only twitter client which supports neat Nastaleeq urdu fonts as well as transliteration. It’s a work in progress and does not implement all twitter features....

Last night, I read about the new Nasteeq font available in Windows 8 and I just had to check it out. After leaving my machine up all night to install the consumer preview, I finally had time to examine the new “Urdu Typeset” out a while ago. Although Microsoft explicitly states it to be a ‘document’ font, it never hurts to check out how it behaves in a web UI setting....