December 2019

Poetry and a cup of coffee

Poetry is a complex genre of literature, and it is often something that we wouldn't expect computers to be able to understand. Poems play with the language by intentionally breaking its structure and by expressing meaning in figurative language such as metaphors. A lot of the expressive power of poetry lies in its ability of provoking certain imagery, certain emotions, in the reader. 😌 As it turns out, it is possible to analyze Finnish poetry automatically in Python. 😃

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The amazing murre Python library

When we Finns write online or message with friends and family, we hardly ever resort to using standard written Finnish (kirjakieli). Instead, we write as we would speak (in puhekieli), as using the standardized spelling would make our communication sound a bit too official. Now, for computers, this is quite a challenge, as most of the datasets used for NLP tools represent well curated normative text. 🤯 Luckily, as always, there's a solution for processing spoken Finnish text in Python. ☺️

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sunset behind an airplane

This year I have had a chance to travel all around the world in the name of science publishing a great deal of papers and having a chance to attend conferences of so many different fields from NLP and computational creativity to a video game conference. ☺️ As Finland is a bit remotely located, there's often only one option for an airline with the least number of layovers: Finnair and its one world partners. As a result, I ended up gaining sapphire status and an access to airport lounges. In this post, I will share some ideas of a lounge access.

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