Skilja Blog

How Meanings of Words Change

We all know that our language is fluid and words can change their meaning over time. Words get extinct and new words are created but more often existing words are adapted to new circumstances. It is interesting to see how this happens in the course of years but...

The Meaning of Words

A famous poem by German poet Christian Morgenstern starts with the line that probably everybody has heard once: “Die Möwen sehen alle aus, als ob sie Emma hießen” which is in the translation by Karl F. Ross: “The seagulls by their looks suggest that...

Visual Classifiers From Random Images

Now this is an interesting experiment that leads us very close to the touch point between machine classification and human imaginations. As described in previous posts, auto-classification algorithms are using features that are extracted from the objects to be...

Practical Semantics

As you have seen in previous posts I was pointing out the difficulty for software to really understand English language mainly lies in the ambiguity of words and their related meanings. The technology to resolve this difficulty is called semantic analysis. I recently...

Understanding the Weather

If you live in Europe you will agree with me that the weather this spring has been the worst since a long time. In fact it was freezing and snowing all through March right into April. And it has not been much better on the East coast in the U.S. We experienced some...

What is the truth?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Prof. Dr. Jürgen Lenerz from University of Cologne Statements are propositions which are true with respect to a certain possible world, the discourse world. We have already discussed the concept of the “world’” in a...

What is the world?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Prof. Dr. Jürgen Lenerz from University of Cologne When asked what we talk about, we would possibly say that we talk about “the world”. But what is the world? Perhaps we would say that the world somehow exists outside...

Taxonomy and Hierarchies

Classification can be defined as modeling real objects via a simplified mathematical representation consisting of a set of characteristic features. The goal of such a description is to collect objects, which are quite similar into one group. A big benefit of the...

What do we talk about?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Prof. Dr. Jürgen Lenerz from University of Cologne We, i.e. adult and sound human beings, are able to talk about everything we want to talk about. But what do we want to talk about? We want to talk about our thoughts...

The Paper Challenge

In one of my favorite movies “Brazil” by Terry Gilliam a man gets suffocated by paper. “Brazil” is a quite bizarre adaptation of the novel “1984” by George Orwell with a lot of ideas how not only society but also technology could evolve much differently than we all...

Faults and Tolerance

Humans have a remarkable capability to compensate for noisy signal and incomplete information. We are able to distinguish and recognize relevant information even when the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Missing data is reconstructed from context knowledge or...

Classification of – Chairs

If you have followed my presentations in the past you know that document classification closely corresponds to concept creation of the human mind. The concepts represent classes of real life objects. We are able to recognize concepts and group objects and group them...