Content-based recommendation using cosine similarity — Move over GoodReads! There’s a disruptor in town, known as PO-REC, your friendly neighborhood poem-recommending robot. (Just kidding, GoodReads. Feel free to make PO-REC an offer). The preparation First, you’ll need to get your data in good order. Basically all you’ll need is a DataFrame with all numerical values and without any…

Analyzing and categorizing poetry to prepare for content-based recommendation — Within written media, poetry is often regarded as enigmatic, frivolous, or too niche. As a result, poems (even by established poets) are often overlooked by larger publishers and literature-focused websites alike. (The anti-capitalist nature of poetry may play a role here as well). …

By quickly generating poetry with textgenrnn More than once, I have waxed philosophic about a future in which it is regular practice for a human and machine to work together to produce writing. I tend to daydream of a human writer tinkering in a shop with several of their mini-robot…

Image to Text in Python! — Yeahhh, your computer’s not so good at reading the text found in images. But there’s no use whining about it, computer! Your human overlords are here to save you yet again. Introducing PyTesseract (disclaimer: it’s been around for awhile) Also referred to as Python-tesseract, PyTesseract is a wrapper for the Tesseract-OCR Engine…

A Twitter Sentiment Analysis with Eric Blander — Thinking back on the early days of the pandemic, and where we are today, I still struggle to process the the stark shift in the narrative around whether or not the public should wear masks. I remember it being strange then, and it seems even stranger now. …

Verifying Volunteer Entries to the 2015 NYC Street Trees Census Never has a walk around the block been so important. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on everyone’s social wellbeing, New Yorkers can find some shred of solace in the over 650,000 publicly owned trees that grace their streets…

An attempt at describing the vectorization of language As described in my first post, word vectors are a crucial part to analyzing, comparing, predicting, and generating text. They also seem quite mysterious at first glance. In fact, take a look at a vector I created for the word mysterious.

How to build a useable body of text — What is a corpus? Not-so-fun fact of the day: in Latin, corpus means body. For our purposes, a corpus is a collection (*cough* body *cough*) of texts, on which we can perform various natural language processing (NLP) functions. …

Recommendations for Microsoft an EDA project in collaboration with Jesse Blant Scenario Microsoft is looking to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and others. In particular, they want to start creating original content. How can we optimize their entry into the entertainment industry? In this project, we analyze television and movie data…