I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane

What did Vladimir Nabokov see in the first verses of Pale Fire? Was it "weathered wood" or "polished ebony"? As a synesthete, his perception of words, letters and numbers was always tainted with a certain color. Synesthesia, the leak of a sensation into another, is a relatively rare condition. It was known to be more frequent among artists, such as the composer Alexander Scriabin or the painter David Hockney, but it turns out that it might also be frequent among autists. This might even be the reason that some of them have a savant syndrome (a phenomenon first popularized by the movie Rain Man).

One of those autistic savants, Daniel Tammet explains in the video below how he sees the world and how this allows him to carry out extraordinary intellectual tasks.

In his talk, Daniel Tammet explains how he performs a multiplication by analogical thinking. Because he sees a pattern in the numbers, he gives the problem another interpretation, another meaning, where the solution is effortless. This would happen at the level of the semantic representation (i.e. when the brains deciphers...

Let us continue this series of posts on IMDB reviews. In the previous post I used mutual information to identify a consistent trend in the reviews: very positive and very negative reviews are shorter than average reviews by about 2 sentences. But how can we give a full description of the style of reviews? And, what is style anyway?

Let's refer to the definition.

style /stīl/: A manner of doing something.

So style covers every feature of the text, from lexical (use of the vocabulary) to semantic (meaning attributed to expressions). The question of style has kept the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) very busy because this is a strong indicator of the content of a text. What is it about? How reliable is it? Who is the author? However, most of the emphasis is on the syntax, because semantics is still a long and painful way ahead. Alan Turing, by his claim that a machine is able to think if it is able to communicate with humans in their natural languages (the Turing test), sparked a general interest for the question of language in the field of artificial intelligence. A bunch of chatting robots...