R Waters My Garden

I’m at a party, and the topic of programming languages comes up. A quarter of the room politely leaves, another half rudely leaves, and the remaining three people banter about the proper language for a certain project. Bob, Marsha, and I have the room to ourselves.

Tonight we’re talking microcontrollers: Arduino or Raspberry Pi. We like to connect things and aren’t afraid to release the magic white smoke with an ill-advised application of excess voltage. Bob assumes programming is done with micropython. Marsha prefers C.

“I use R to water my garden,” I say. “Yep, I installed R on a Raspberry Pi and use it to turn the water valves on and off.”

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The Imperfection of Language

Human languages are notoriously ambiguous. Computer languages are notoriously un-ambiguous. Humans (mostly) are comfortable with uncertainty. Computers don’t even believe uncertainty is possible. It’s what led us to create un-ambiguous languages specifically for computers.

One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know.”

Groucho Marx
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Integrating Computer Vision with NLP

My new car displays the highway speed limit. It’s a small reproduction of a speed limit sign, located on the upper left corner of the display. Which isn’t such a big deal, considering map data has included speed limits for the last ten years.

But I had a surprise when I was driving on a rural back road. It was twisty and in the middle of the forest. I was preoccupied with trying to avoid the deer springing out of the ditches, but noticed the speed limit had changed to eighty-five miles per hour. What?

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Master AI-powered Sentiment Analysis

You sent me the wrong version of the Excaliber Coffee Pot. Your company constantly makes mistakes with shipping. I hate doing business with you!

I just wanted to tell you I received my Excaliber Coffee Pot today. It is exactly what I expected and needed. I can’t thank you enough!

Consider these two pieces of feedback from customers, sent via the contact form on a company’s website. One is from an unhappy customer – and one is from a satisfied customer. Both are regarding shipping the Excaliber Coffee Pot. An astute product manager (we’ll call her “Sarah”) would follow up: why is this customer happy (or sad)? Would this customer recommend this product to (or warn) their friends? Would this customer shop with us again?

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A Guide to Natural Language Processing with R

Let’s assume you’re reading this for one of three reasons:

  • You have experience with R, but not NLP
  • You have experience with NLP, but not R
  • You have no idea what this is all about, but someone said you need this for some reason. (Perhaps a thesis advisor? A data scientist? A trendy article?)

Let’s start with two brief explanations you can use to orient yourself in this new world.

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