Joseph Smarr

[Note: This is the first in what I hope will become a series of technical articles on the lessons I've learned "from the trenches" of my web development work at Plaxo. Non-techy readers are invited to skip any articles categorized under "Web development". ] Update: This article has been picked up by Ajaxian, and it’s sparked an [...]

If you would like to find out when I post something new to my web site, here are three ways to do it (ranging from least work to most useful): Just check josephsmarr.com periodically. Newest stories are at the top, and you can use the calendar and category links on the right sidebar to see [...]

This was a pleasant surprise to wake up to yesterday: Guy Kawasaki, the widely read startup guru whose top-ten lists of do’s and don’t for entrepreneurs are gospel here in the valley, posted a new top-ten list called “The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption“. Number 8 caught my attention in particular: 8. [...]

Sources of Success for Boosted Wrapper Induction Journal of Machine Learning Research, Volume 5 Written October 2001, published December 2004 Download PDF (29 pages) Download PPT (900KB; presentation at Stanford’s Seminar for Computational Learning and Adaptation) I co-wrote this paper during the first summer I started doing NLP research, but it didn’t see the light [...]

Conditional Estimation of HMMs for Information Extraction Submitted to ACL 2003 Sapporo, Japan July 2003 Download PDF (8 pages) Download PPT (500KB; presentation to NLP group, including work discussed in this paper) This is another paper I wrote that didn’t get accepted for publication. Like my character-level paper, it was interesting and useful but not well [...]

Finding Educational Resources on the Web: Exploiting Automatic Extraction of Metadata Workshop on Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia Sempetmber 22, 2003 Download PDF (4 pages) The Semantic Web is a great idea: expose all of the information on the web in a machine-readable format, and intelligent agents will the be able to read [...]

Named Entity Recognition with Character-Level Models HLT-NAACL CoNLL-03 Shared Task Edmonton, Canada June 1, 2003 Download PDF (4 pages) Download PPT (3.8MB; presentation at CoNLL-03) Every year that Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) has a “shared task” where they define a specific problem to solve, provide a standard data set to train your [...]

Classifying Unknown Proper Noun Phrases Without Context Technical Report dbpubs/2002-46 Stanford University April 9, 2002 Download PDF (9 pages) Download PPT (1.3MB; presentation of the paper to the NLP group) As I describe in my post about my master’s thesis, I started doing research in Natural Language Processing after Chris Manning, the professor that taught [...]

Categorization by Character-Level Models: Exploiting the Sound Symbolism of Proper Names Master’s thesis, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University Christopher D. Manning, Advisor June 11, 2003 Download PDF (52 pages)  After four years as an undergraduate at Stanford, I wasn’t ready to leave yet. There were more classes I wanted to take, and I wanted to [...]

Technical and Privacy Challenges for Integrating FOAF into Existing Applications FOAF Workshop Galway, Ireland September 2, 2004 Full paper (HTML) Download PPT (2.1MB) FOAF stands for friend-of-a-friend and it’s an open standard for describing your contact information and who you know. When social networking sites started exploding, many people were annoyed that they had to [...]