Deb—We talked about some of these in our Wednesday meeting, but didn't do much deciding or prioritizing. After that, at the hackathon travel meeting, Rachel reminded us that the hackathon is "a community-focused event" and that we as WMF staff should be "supporting, connecting, and helping volunteer and affiliate developers." So, I think I'm going to update my hackathon participation info to include a link to the list of projects I want to work on, and hope that someone from outside the WMF contacts me about something. On the learning side, I've already gotten David to agree to help me with some of the technical bits I need for my some of my proposed projects, either before or at the hackathon (yay!). I also hope that the "Tell me why your search sucks" sign will encourage people to stop and chat with us. I figure random people chatting with us about search and anyone who wants to work with us would take precedence over any other projects we might prefer to work on at the hackathon, though I plan to fall back to my list if I run out of other things to do or people to talk to.

Justin—We can definitely talk about ways to keep improving the ML ranking (or other ML approaches for search). I don't know if there's time during the hackathon to pull something together—I guess it depends on how complex it is. More broadly—and Erik can speak more definitively about this—I'd say while there's always some ML-related stuff going on in the background, our Q4 goals are less about Learn-to-Rank/ML, so there may not be much bandwidth for any complex projects in the short term. That said, I'm gathering ideas for NLP applications for search—which often overlaps with ML applications—so if you have any ideas (or if anyone else does!), please share them, whether here or off-list.

—Trey


Trey Jones
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 1:09 PM, Justin Ormont <justin.ormont@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings Deb/Trey/Erik,

I'd enjoy joining the discussions on these hackathon topics also.

Specifically, I'd like to see I can help improve MWF's search relevance using additional machine learning techniques/ML-packages.

Thanks,
--justin

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 8:53 AM, Deborah Tankersley <dtankersley@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Nice stuff!

Should we set up a meeting to talk more in depth about this, as we're about 2 weeks out from the Hackathon right now?

Cheers,

Deb

--

deb tankersley

Program Manager, Engineering

Wikimedia Foundation


On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 8:39 AM, Trey Jones <tjones@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I've got my own list of more language-focused not-necessarily-great ideas, in order of my current desire to work on them:
  • Mirandese (mwl) analysis plugin built from Portuguese and French parts, plus a stop list provided by an mwl editor
  • plugin to merge high surrogates and low surrogates that get split up by the Chinese analyzer
  • plugin to do automatic homoglyph corrections
  • plugin to do transliteration for languages where it is relatively easy (Serbian was on the list, but it’s already done!—and for very simple mappings this is just a char map)
  • look into ways of automatically generating a stemmer from Wiktionary conjugation/declension data (maybe start with Estonian?)
  • compare the analyzers for the top 5-10 wiki languages by volume, and look for ways to increase consistency among them
  • develop a different statistical approach to detect wrong keyboard typing and build a search-only filter to generate alternative tokens—for Russian/English, Hebrew/English, OR one hand on wrong home row
  • update RelForge with some additional metrics I’ve been collecting
  • project Wordnet or other thesaurus/ontology onto short strings (e.g., Commons descriptions, Wikipedia titles, etc.) to determine useful thesaurus terms and prune the rest
  • recheck differences in unpacked vs monolithic analyzers (eliminating our automatic upgrades, which 98% likely to have caused the diffs)
  • “Bollywood detector”—identify and map Bollywood movie names into multiple scripts
I was planning to work on the Mirandese analysis plugin and maybe one of the next three on the list. But if anyone wants to collaborate on any of the others, I'm happy to do so.

Trey Jones
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 6:14 PM, Erik Bernhardson <ebernhardson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
With the hackathon coming up I thought we could ponder what could be done while there. I've been constructing a list of horrible ideas over the last couple weeks:


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