JavaNLP meeting notes for 10/31/02

Here's a summary of yesterday's JavaNLP meeting:

- Classify API is coming along nicely, Dan and Kristina have the basic
sketch of what functionality will go where done, and this week they are
working on a preliminary implementation that will include the interface API,
a couple of different classifier implementations, and a test class that
demonstrates how to be a client. The basic division is into the "outside
API" for clients that takes in Datums and returns Objects for their labels
and the inside API that takes in arrays of doubles and returns an int (for
label). There will be standard translation code or you can do it yourself if
you need the features in a specific way. There will also be
ClassifierFactory classes (both inside and outside) for taking training data
(DataCollection) and producting a classifier, which can be serialized.
Hopefully as more people want to use classification in their projects, it
will drive us to find the right level of functionality to provide.

- The former maxent.tagger package is now in tagger.maxent and should be
usable for other applications. We should test this by having someone else
try to use tagging in an app.

- Starting now, everyone needs to send me email by Tuesday night with a
brief summary of what they've gotten done this week, any problems they're
having, and suggestions for what to cover in the meeting. This will give me
a chance to answer questions that people have and compile a more accurate
meeting agenda. It will also prevent the current mad dash to get code
committed 5 mins before the meeting. I will send out a reminder but make
sure to get your week's work done by Tuesday night!

With that in mind, here are the specific tasks for this week:

Dan:
- finish javadoc package comments asap!!
- implement classify API with Kristina

Sep:
- finish javadoc package comments asap!!
- finish converting document to use meta-data
- update processor api to use documents with meta-data

Kristina:
- implement classify API with Dan

Joris:
- help clean up Tim's ie.pcfg code (now in CVS!)

Huy:
- extending iehmm stuff to use multiple targets
- clean up and test merging code

Joseph:
- more on conditional HMMs
- talk to Martin Frost (via Dan?) about cgi support for cvsweb

As always, email me early and often if you're having problems updating,
committing, or anything else standing in the way of being productive.

Thanks! js