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Mashing up the browser in Maine

mitcho — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:00:32 +0000

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.

Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

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Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ

mitcho — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:08:03 +0000

今夜リリースされる Ubiquity の最新版、0.5 に備えて日本語で Ubiquity のスクリーンキャストを作ってみました。 Ubiquity 0.5 は特に多言語化を重視したリリースで、 Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドが日本語とデンマーク語で使えるようになっています。是非インストールしてみてください！

追伸： ７月３日現在、 Ubiquity 0.5 のリリースを遅らせる方向になったので、残念ながら今日はリリースされません。是非リリース後インストールしてみてください。

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

As Ubiquity 0.5 will be released soon (Thursday morning in Mountain View), I decided it was a good time to put together a screencast in Japanese demoing the use of the new Japanese parser and commands.

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Ubiquity presentation at Tokyo 2.0

mitcho — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:54:13 +0000

This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

The event also coincided with Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane Asia tour, attracting even more interest to the event. In the end it was the largest Tokyo 2.0 event ever.

As I leave Tokyo next month, I’ll be sad to not be able to continue to be a part of Tokyo 2.0. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people and learned a lot at the monthly events. I’ll definitely make sure to schedule them in in my future travels back to Japan and I highly recommend any of you who travel to Tokyo do so as well.

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Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation

mitcho — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:10:43 +0000

I just made a screencast with Foxkeh to demo the Ubiquity next generation parser demo and to demonstrate how easy it is to add your own language. Foxkeh wants you to localize the parser into your language. How could you say no? ^^

Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation from mitcho on Vimeo.

There are some details which are not covered in this introductory video, such as how to deal with case marking languages or languages without spaces. Hopefully this’ll inspire some people to play with the demo, though. I’d love to hear your comments! ^^

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This week on Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation

mitcho — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:30:31 +0000

Last week I released a proof-of-concept demo of the next generation Ubiquity parser design and it was also the focus of discussion in our weekly internationalization meeting.¹ Christian Sonne even wrote a Danish plugin for it during the meeting—a testament to the pluggability and of the new parser design.

In addition, at the Ubiquity weekly meeting, pushing this new parser into Ubiquity proper was identified as a key goal of Ubiquity 0.2, making frequent iteration and debate over this parser essential.

To that end, I’ll highlight some of the changes made to the parser demo codebase in the past week:

left-branching support and a Japanese parser
basic French parser
a timer display
Danish parser by Christian Sonne
synonyms: as an example, you can now use “purchase” or “buy,” both of which point to the same verb.
verb name localizations: you no longer need to use the English verb names with different languages. (Currently only Japanese has any verb localizations.)
a number of optimizations and corrections

I encourage you to check out the demo again or check out the source on BitBucket.

➔ Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation demo

I’d love to get comments, patches, or additional parsers! Thanks! ^^

The weekly internationalization meeting, like all Ubiquity weekly meetings, are completely open to the public. We’d love to hear new voices contribute to the discussion! Take a look at the schedule of upcoming meetings. ↩

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Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists

mitcho — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:26:47 +0000

Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists from mitcho on Vimeo.

Below is a transcript of this video. Please distribute this video far and wide to anyone who may be interested. ^^

Dear linguist,

My name is mitcho and I am currently involved with an exciting open source community project at Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity. The project’s goal is to empower the user to accomplish more on the web, and to do this, Ubiquity connects disparate services from across the web with language. Let me show you what I mean.

Example 1

Suppose you’re emailing a friend to tell them where to meet later. It would be great if you could insert a map in your email, but you would regularly have to go to a maps application and insert a link.

But with Ubiquity installed, you can just pull up Ubiquity with a keystroke, enter map Shinjuku, pick the right result and rearrange it, and click “insert map.” It’s that simple.

Example 2

Let’s say you’ve stumbled upon an article in French and you want to send a bit of it to a friend. Again, you could just send a link, but with Ubiquity we can do much better than that. We’ll first select the quote we want and translate it to English. There we go. Now I’ll select the bit I actually want to send, pull up Ubiquity and execute email this to Aza. Because Ubiquity interacts with my address book, it knows who I mean by “Aza” and composes my email for me.

As you can see, the Ubiquity interface makes it easy to accomplish tasks with minimal interruption to a user’s workflow. New verbs are easy to write and there’s already an active community writing new verbs and sharing them with users.

The localization of Ubiquity

Right now Ubiquity offers a basic English parser and an experimental Japanese one, but Firefox itself currently ships with 55 distinct localizations. We hope to localize Ubiquity into a number of these languages.

In order to accomplish this, we need support from viewers like you.

For each language—whether Basque, Polish, or Esperanto—we hope to build a parser to take the command and pick out its verb and the arguments and then identify the semantic roles of each argument. Ubiquity will then apply the verb to those arguments and execute.

We’ll need both data and expertise into the languages we hope to localize. If you’re a native speaker or researcher, what is the structure of commands in your language? How do you code for different kinds of arguments? What do your pronouns look like? We’d love to see blog posts, discussions, or quick mockups on these and other topics.

For those of you with NLP experience, we’d love to get more folks involved in writing these parsers. And in the near future, we’d appreciate anyone who wants to simply try out Ubiquity in their language and give us feedback.

The idea of using natural language to direct computers is far from new. But in this limited context of individual commands—single imperative clauses without complexities such as negation or quantification—I believe there is great potential for Ubiquity to support other languages and bring this interface—this new way of interacting with the web—to more people in more communities.

ubiquity.mozilla.com
bringing linguistics to a browser near you

wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/i18n
help us localize the future

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