A laptop with vpn

A VPN is a nice tool for securing your internet connection and changing your virtual geographic location. VPNs are useful especially if you are using a public WIFI in a hotel or an airport, visiting a country with not so free internet such as China or doing activities that might get you into a trouble due to the political climate in your country. Now, some VPN providers offer an internet killswitch as a part of their Windows app. And sometimes this option will literally kill your internet for good. 😅

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an airplane flying over the buildings

This year I have had the chance of experiencing the business class a bunch of times for free as free upgrade and even one self paid vacation. Traveling in business class is probably a dream of every traveler, but what should one consider before throwing a bunch of money in for a business class ticket or an upgrade? 🤔

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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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text saying you got this

Turku dependency parsers, both the statistical and neural ones, are no doubt among the most important recent NLP tools developed for Finnish. Without them, doing NLP for Finnish would be extremely difficult. This posts explains how to use them easily to parse Finnish from your Python code. 🐍

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make games in Python with Unity

Python is a great programming language due to a multitude of reasons such as a long list of libraries ready to solve almost any problem you might encounter. For me, however, the biggest reason to prefer coding in Python with Unity over C# is that I simply don't have to type as much; no type declarations, semicolons or curly brackets, not to mention return types, scopes and so on… 😴

Yet, online I can only find outdated guides or worse yet "why don't you just learn C#, it's easy and blah blah" comments. 😫 But I like Python. 🥺Therefore, this post teaches you how to use IronPython with Unity. Just remember that IronPython only supports Python 2.

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How to install VISL CG3 on Mac, Windows and Linux

VISL CG3 is a neat tool for running constraint grammars (CGs) for things such as morphological disambiguation or syntactic parsing. Grammars of this formalism have been developed for a great many endangered Uralic languages boosting their NLP. And these CGs are actually easily available in UralicNLP for Python programmers.

Even for UralicNLP, a tool called vislcg3 needs to be installed on your machine, and it might be a tricky task if you cannot find the correct binaries for your operating system. Therefore I tailored this guide.

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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…)
crossword puzzle

Morphology can be described as the smallest information bearing unit of the human language. Words that are inflected can be divided into morphemes, e.g. -ed in talked is a morpheme that adds the meaning of a past tense into the verb talk; -s in dogs pluralizes the noun and so on. These morphemes that are added to words are known as affixes. There are different kinds of affixes and in this post we are going to look at them more closely. 🤓 (more…)