It’s time for one more installment of Nountype Quirks, where I review and tweak Ubiquity’s built-in nountypes. For an introduction to this effort, please read Judging Noun Types and my updates from Day 1 and Day 2.
Today I ended up spending most of the day attempting to implement (but not yet completing) major improvements to the geolocation-related nountypes whose plans I lay out here.
Note: this blog post includes a number of graphs using HTML/CSS formatting. If you are reading this article through a feed reader or planet, I invite you to read it on my site.(more…)
Today I’m continuing the process of reviewing and tweaking all of the nountypes built-in to Ubiquity. For a more respectable introduction to this endeavor, please read my blog post from a couple days ago, Judging Noun Types and my status update from yesterday, Nountype Quirks: Day 1.
Note: this blog post includes a number of graphs using HTML/CSS formatting. If you are reading this article through a feed reader or planet, I invite you to read it on my site.
Today I began the process of going through all of the nountypes built-in to Ubiquity using the principles and criteria I laid out yesterday—a task I’ve had in planning for a while now. As I explained yesterday, improved suggestions and scoring from the built-in nountypes could directly translate to better and smarter suggestions, resulting in a better experience for all users. Here I’ll document some of the nountype quirks I’ve discovered so far and what remedy has been implemented or is planned.
Note: this blog post includes a number of graphs using HTML/CSS formatting. If you are reading this article through a feed reader or planet, I invite you to read it on my site.
Different arguments are classified into different kinds of nouns in Ubiquity using noun types.1 For example, a string like “Spanish” could be construed as a language, while “14.3” should not be. These kinds of relations are then used by the parser to introduce, for example, language-related verbs (like translate) using the former argument, and number-related verbs (like zoom or calculate) based on the latter. Ubiquity nountypes aren’t exclusive—a single string can count as valid for a number of different nountypes and in particular the “arbitrary text” nountype (noun_arb_text) will always accept any string given.
Yesterday I participated in and presented at a workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World at ACM SIGIR in Boston. The focus of the workshop was on cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Cross-language information retrieval systems enable users to retrieve relevant information across different languages for a certain task or query. Even if you have a budget to translate some documents from a foreign language to your language, how do you find the relevant documents to translate in the first place if you don’t speak (or read) that source language? This is the type of problem that CLIR aims to solve.
This video walks through the process of converting your Ubiquity commands to Ubiquity 0.5 with Parser 2. For more information, please consult the command conversion tutorial.
A natural language interface is only “natural” if it’s in your natural language. With this mantra in mind, we’ve been making steady progress on the challenging problem of Ubiquity localization. The first fruit of this research is in the localization of the parser and bundled commands in Ubiquity 0.5. Here today is a visual guide on command localization in Ubiquity and different options we can take in attacking the community command localization problem. (more…)
I have been accepted to present a short paper entitled “Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface” at the ACM SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World in Boston on July 23rd. I’ll probably be there in Boston a few days before or after as well in order to find an apartment for the fall. If anyone is in Boston at that time and would like to meet up, or if you’re near Cambridge and looking for an apartment-mate, please let me know.
If you would like to see a preprint of the paper, please contact me at x@x.com where x=mitcho.
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.
Here at Mozilla Japan Firefox 3.5 Headquarters,1 we just launched the new and improved Light of Firefox (in Japanese, tomoshibi (灯)) for Firefox 3.5. The Light of Firefox is a real-time, interactive website which shows sparks on a map of Japan for every manual download of the new Firefox from mozilla.jp.
The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!
As many of you know, earlier this week we released a preview of version 0.5 (0.5pre). We’re going to stress test and refine this release through the weekend and push the official 0.5 out next Tuesday. This release will have fully localized commands for Danish and Japanese, as well as parser settings for a number of other languages. Read this Labs blog post to learn more about the 0.5 release and how to test it.
It’s not too late to add localizations for other languages to 0.5, though. Localizations help make Ubiquity more “natural” for more users, offering a new level of ease and familiarity to the already powerful Ubiquity. We have a new tutorial to help you localize commands.
To help encourage command localization, we now have gettext-style po template files for all the bundled command feeds in the hg repository. You can find these files in the ubiquity/localization/templates directory of the repository, or on our online hg repository.
If you complete some localizations (even incomplete) for your language and would like to submit them into the repository, for the time being, you can post them on this trac ticket.1
As many of you know, the upcoming Firefox 3.5 was code-named Shiretoko after the Shiretoko National Park on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. The Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan just launched a very cool open-web-powered promotional website, interFORest, together with a very powerful educational site, discovershiretoko.org/. I just went to interforest.org/ and registered for my own virtual tree to be planted on the virtual Shiretoko Park. This tree banner will keep track of traffic through my site to the interFORest site and will grow this tree accordingly over time. You can then go to interforest.org and see all the trees growing on the park. With your help, we can grow it into a forest!
If you are reading this through a feed reader or planet, click on the permalink to view the banner embedded below:
Place one of these personalized canvas-powered virtual tree banners on your site to spread the word on Firefox 3.5, the Shiretoko Park and Foundation, and the power of open communities. All the cool kids are doing it. ^^
As we get close to wrapping up Ubiquity 0.5 (currently planned to ship—fingers crossed—on Monday) one remaining issue is how to incorporate our cute new Cocoia-designed and community-produced icon, the Ubiquibot. The difficult decision is how to take this finely detailed icon and produce a 16 x 16 favicon.
I came up with three different options:
1. 2. 3.
Seeing them on my blog doesn’t quite compare to how they will be used, so here are some screenshots of them in context:[^1]
2. 
3. 
