[infomap-nlp-users] New Semantic Vectors Package, and request for beta testers

[Dominic W. <dwi...@cs...>]

Dear All,

I'd like to draw people's attention to a new Semantic Vectors package that
I've been working on. The project is hosted at
http://code.google.com/p/semanticvectors/
and there is a beta release available along with some test data.

As many of you are aware, the Infomap NLP package has suffered from two
main problems over the years, which are ease of installation and use, and
scalability. The new Semantic Vectors has a good chance or providing
significant improvements in both these areas. For ease of use, it's
implemented entirely in Java, and its only dependencies are Apache Lucene,
Ant, and having Java itself installed. For scalability, it uses Random
Projection instead of Singular Value Decomposition, which is much more
scalable and drawing increasing interest in the research community.
For a more thorough comparison with the Infomap NLP package, see
http://code.google.com/p/semanticvectors/wiki/InfomapComparison

For anyone on the list interested in the new package, I would really
appreciate it if you'd give it a try, kick the tires, let me know if it
works for you. It would be great to have a couple of reports from beta
testers before I announce the package on the corpora mailing list.

While it's way premature to consider the Infomap NLP package as
deprecated, I think it may become gradually superseded by the new Semantic
Vectors package, and I will probably be putting more of my own development
efforts into the new package than into any further releases of Infomap
NLP. However, I'd really like to thank everyone who's contributed code,
fixes, support and collaboration with Infomap NLP, and I hope people
continue to find good uses for the software. I will continue to answer
questions and give help where possible.

Happy semantic modelling!
Best wishes,
Dominic