The hottest Text Analysis Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Essay Club: The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes

Mind & Mythos • 99 implied HN points • 24 Feb 24
📚 Literature Literary theory Philosophy Critical Theory Text Analysis Cultural Studies
  1. The idea of 'The Death of the Author' suggests that once a piece of writing is out in the world, it's not just about the author's intention anymore. Readers can find many meanings in it, beyond what the author might have intended.
  2. By removing the author from the center of a text, we open up new interpretations and dialogues. This means that literature becomes a space where multiple voices can interact and create a richer understanding.
  3. This perspective challenges the traditional view of authorship, making it possible for everyone's interpretation to hold value. It emphasizes the importance of the reader's role in creating meaning from a text.

Results from poll #2

The Counterfactual • 59 implied HN points • 08 Feb 24
🕹 Technology AI Readability Human factors Text Analysis Empirical Studies
  1. The poll showed that readers are interested in how well large language models (LLMs) can change the readability of texts. This will be explored further in a detailed study.
  2. The study will involve real people judging how easy or hard the modified texts are to read. This is important because readability is something people understand best.
  3. Updates on the study will be shared about once a month, along with regular posts on other topics related to language processing and understanding.

Do text embeddings perfectly encode text?

The Gradient • 42 implied HN points • 06 Mar 24
🕹 Technology Data security Text Analysis Information Storage
  1. Text embeddings may not perfectly encode text, raising concerns about security protocols for embedded data.
  2. The 'Vec2text' solution aims to accurately revert embeddings back into text, highlighting the need for data security measures.
  3. The challenge of recovering text from embeddings is being addressed in research, questioning the security of using embedding vectors for information storage and communication.

Open source libraries for Text and Time Series

Gradient Flow • 99 implied HN points • 25 Aug 22
🕹 Technology Machine Learning Text Analysis
  1. Consider incorporating transformer-based language models like BERTopic, PolyFuzz, and KeyBERT in NLP pipelines for text analysis.
  2. Explore new open source libraries like Merlion, Nixtla, Kats, and Greykite for time series analysis and modeling.
  3. Learn about AI toolkits like Ray AI Runtime (AIR) that unify ML libraries, facilitating scaled machine learning workloads with minimal code.
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Afternoon project: JPEG DCT text lossifizer

lcamtuf’s thing • 3 HN points • 17 Mar 24
🕹 Technology Algorithms Compression Text Analysis
  1. Using discrete cosine transform (DCT) for lossy compression can be applied to text data by converting it into frequency coefficients, quantizing them, and then reversing the process to obtain reduced-fidelity text.
  2. Mapping text data to numerical representation through a perceptual character table, rather than ASCII, can significantly improve readability even in high quantization settings.
  3. In text compression, focusing on higher-frequency components is crucial for maintaining readability, unlike image compression where higher-frequency components are reduced more aggressively.