William John Bert

Here’s some sample code that shows the basic steps necessary to use gensim to create a corpus, train models (log entropy and latent semantic analysis), and perform semantic similarity comparisons and queries. gensim has an excellent tutorial, and this does not replace reading and understanding it. Nonetheless, this may be helpful for those interested in [...]

On Tuesday, I presented at the monthly DC Python meetup. My talk was an introduction to gensim, a free Python framework for topic modelling and semantic similarity using LSA/LSI and other statistical techniques. I’ve been using gensim on and off for several months at work, and I really appreciate its performance, clean API design, documentation, [...]

Tomorrow at the May 2012 DC Python meetup, I’m giving a talk on gensim, a Python framework for topic modeling that I use at work and on my own for semantic similarity comparisons. (I’ll post the slides and example code for the talk soon.) I’ve found gensim to be a useful and well-designed tool, and [...]

My good friend Steve has hosted the lowercase, the monthly reading series associated with 826DC, for three years. Steve has a charming habit of introducing his readers with made-up bios, so in his honor, I asked some lowercase regulars to write fake bios of him and share them at the third anniversary reading on April [...]

Today’s the third annual Friendsgiving, a Thanksgiving-like pre-Thanksgiving event for a bunch of people who like each other; hence, Friendsgiving. Thanksgiving’s always been my favorite holiday so I’m more than happy to celebrate it twice a year. The first two Friendsgivings took place at my house, but because in the spring I traded my room [...]

An interlude from the recent trend of hardcore Django action: > When I spoke with a female intern this summer, she recounted how, in 2006, the > GNOME Project, a free and open source software project, received almost 200 Google > Summer of Code applicants. All of them were male. When GNOME advertised an > [...]

Thanks to django-registration, I was able to build a working account registration/login system pretty easily. But I wanted to give users the ability to use their existing accounts through popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., rather than have to create yet another account. Here’s how I did it. Sorting Through the Choices There are [...]

Since March, I’ve been working with DC students from several high schools, including Duke Ellington, Ballou, Wilson and Bell, in evening poetry workshops at 826DC. A bunch of us have been helping out—Mike Scalise, Adam Pelligrini, and Sally Keith (the last two being actual poets, while Mike and I, both prose writers, were faking it [...]

I can’t stand Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, but the best part about waking up at 6:35 a.m. is his Writer’s Almanac. For five minutes he puts his cornmeal voice to good use, first to list this-day-in-literature history tidbits, then to read a poem. In this way I learned that three of my favorite [...]

Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But [...]