humanities

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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How to use Omorfi for Finnish morphology

Omorfi is inarguably an amazing tool for processing Finnish morphology both in analysis and generation. However, using it might be quite a challenge for the users who are not too (H)FST savvy. 😅That is one of the motivations for my UralicNLP library the purpose of which is to provide an easy Python interface for a multitude NLP tools for Uralic languages. (more…)
a leaf

When you hear the word ethics you probably think of things that are considered ethical in the society such as sustainable development, fair trade and all other overwhelmingly world embracing ideologies eco hippies are a bit too vocal about. But there's a lot more to the term than that! Ethics is a set of values that we used in our reasoning. It's closely related to moral which refers to understanding what is right and wrong. As it turns out, ethical thinking can be a lot more than just world embracing handwaving and pretentious strive for anything that is considered ethically desirable in the society. We can actually do ethical thinking from three different points of view covered in this post. 😊  (more…)

An old administrative building in Sweden

When you are studying at school, especially in a democratic welfare state like Finland, you just laugh at the people who are fed with governmental propaganda in other countries. At least, we learn about the unbiased truth! Nooooot quite! 😅 This is something I came to realize in a particular university course.

Throughout the education system before reaching the university we, poor subjects of propaganda, were fed with the overly cute definition of politics: politics is about taking care of common things in the society. Surely, all politicians just want to take care of things and usher the country towards a new era of prosperity. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 It sounds ridiculous, but that was the lie I and my fellow students believed in. (more…)

Statues of saints

I had taken quite a few courses in philosophy, but all I learned from them were long lists of great minds and what they think about the world. But somehow I didn't feel quite satisfied. Was that it? Is philosophy just about knowing what others have thought before you? To know enough thinkers to have a name or two to drop in every single conversation? Then what's the point, I wondered. (more…)