It's another strike day so let's do another personal iteration of #WhatHashtagsMeanToMe. Let's talk about being an #Immigrant, and I guess it might accidentally be strike related in the end.

When I was a wee child we moved from South Africa to the US, so that Dad could pursue a career opportunity. That short-term contract turned into a decision to move for good and I grew up in Florida.

It's strange growing up in a place and feeling like you aren't really of the place

It's the weekend so it's time for a casual #WhatHashtagsMeanToMe. Tonight is about #FPS or #FirstPersonShooter video games, a genre which feels slightly out of touch with my real world pacifism.

For those of who don't know, these are the games where you control an avatar running around in a virtual world and your screen shows you whatever is visible to the avatar from where you are in the world. And you shoot things (usually human-shaped but not always) to score points or complete an objective.

Yesterday I began writing about #WhatHashtagsMeanToMe, a series of threads where I talk about what the topics highlighted in my profile mean to me.

Today it's about #corpus building, which is the process of finding, building, and/or preparing a linguistic dataset. This is essential work for #NaturalLanguageProcessing and a lot of #AI / #ML systems, as your models can only be as good as the data they are based on.

(Yesterday's thread about #NaturalLanguageGeneration: https://mastodon.social/@_dmh/109303098210409632)

Every day that I remember to do it, I'm going to explain what I mean by one of the hashtags in my profile. #WhatHashtagsMeanToMe

I'm at the office, so today is about professional stuff: #NaturalLanguageGeneration (#NLG) involves developing computer systems which can express information in natural language (that is, human languages). There are a bunch of different approaches to NLG and a lot of different tasks that can be considered a part of big-tent NLG.