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 [...]

Over the past couple weeks I worked on relaunching the website for Call + Response, an art show I co-curate with my friend Kira. The website for the second iteration of the show, Call + Response: Textures, is pretty different from the first version. The first was ultra minimal, hand-coded, and didn’t use a CMS—just [...]

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 [...]

In my old dog, new tricks post, I mentioned that, though I used to blog, what you’re reading now represents my first use of WordPress. Was it hard to set up? No. It doesn’t hurt that I have a computer science background, including an undergrad degree in the field. Of course, when I was in [...]

So I’m actually not new to blogging–I blogged for about a year from 2003-2004 and, though it may lead to embarrassment, I’ll even link to the old thing, which is still up: Pleonastic Ephemera. (I’ve also participated in several private group blogs for sharing writing with geographically-dispersed friends.) Pleonastic Ephemera was on Blogspot, which is [...]