A site for eclectic sharing: professional info, projects, code, writing (academic and otherwise, technological and otherwise), course information, and pedagogical materials.
I am a Los Angeles based researcher, educator, and software developer who likes to talk about language and data technology. Feel free to get in touch with queries.
An open-source tool for improving RAG performance, contributed to LangChain, a popular framework for developing applications powered by language models.
The HTML Header Text Splitter is a "structure-aware" chunker that splits text at the element level and adds metadata for each header "relevant" to any given chunk. It can return chunks element by element or combine elements with the same metadata, with the objectives of (a) keeping related text grouped (more or less) semantically and (b) preserving context-rich information encoded in document structures.
For more information, you can read a blog entry exploring use cases, read the documentation, and view the class within the LangChain source code.
Stage an LLM-powered dialogue between any two philosophers in history to see which convictions prevail.
Click here to try it in beta: https://testing.langduel.com
Click here to read about it: https://mziru.com/#blog_dialogue
Technologies:
The bot builds on an algorithm initially developed by Yotam Gafni and has a 100% win rate. This version adds:
Note: this is a pretty old project with basic functionality and a rudimentary UI, and it has not been maintained. If you're interested in seeing further development on it (or related ideas), feel free to contact me.
Technologies:
Some sample output for the keyword "alien":
The algorithm works by maximizing information gain; that is, it transforms the game dataset into a decision tree by splitting nodes into sub-nodes on the unknown variable (a physical feature of the opponent's character) with the greatest entropy in the context of the target variable (the name of the opponent's character).
[Note: this piece is cross-published as a guest entry on the LangChain blog.]
Here I share writing about technical topics related to software development work, including more detailed information about past and present projects, explications of problem-solving processes, and insights gained from exploring and implementing new technologies.
A sample training sequence designed to teach new users how to create end-to-end machine learning projects with Dataiku DSS, a popular platform for building and managing AI and ML workflows.
Topics include: data cleansing, normalization, and enrichment; prototyping and deploying a predictive model.
A selection of upper-division college courses taught in recent years (both online and in person), including sample syllabuses and anonymous student feedback.
ENGL 177: L.A. Noir - This course introduces students to the genre of film noir through fiction and films set in and around the city of Los Angeles, focusing on how these works of literature and visual culture represent and re-imagine the city from one generation to another. Students start by analyzing classic noirs of the 1940s alongside the hard-boiled detective novels on which they were based, then follow the evolution of the genre into some of its more contemporary iterations, e.g. neo-noir and tech-noir. The course examines both the formal history of the genre—its distinct stylistic features as these develop throughout the latter half of the 20th century—and its broader social contexts.
ENGL 115A: American Crime Fiction - This course examines the development of popular styles of American crime fiction, especially around the middle of the 20th century, as readers’ common fascination with detectives and the art of detection gives way to a different sort of fascination with killers and the art of killing. Why do people read these stories? Why do they write them? What forms do they take, and what do these forms indicate about the cultural values and social conflicts that define America in the 20th century?
ENGL 122: Continuity and Discontinuity (Keywords in Theory) - It seems reasonable to assert that, of all literary forms, the novel is most suited to the idea of continuity—to a general sense that things go on and on, that one thing leads to another, and that individual perceptions and experiences link up in meaningful ways that cannot be reduced to discrete episodes or momentary impressions. But it also seems just as reasonable to say that, at least since Laurence Sterne published Tristram Shandy in 1759, no other literary form has more thoroughly mastered the art of refusing to continue—the art of dilation and digression, of leaving gaps and ellipses, of pausing, procrastinating, fixating on disconnected sensual details, and otherwise failing to follow a story through.
Do these aesthetic impulses contradict each other? What values are ascribed to continuity and discontinuity and why? Does this change in the 20th century, when aesthetic practices come under the pressures of modernity in ways that seem more readily assimilable to the cuts and fragments of cinematic montage than to the narrative commitments of literary realism? This course approaches these questions by way of a range of texts from the late 19th and 20th centuries, including influential works of theory and criticism as well as exemplary works of fiction, poetry and film.
"Crane's Speech Figures," NOVEL (Duke UP) - A research article examining rhetorical processes and the creation of new language structures in narrative forms associated with Naturalism.
If you do not have access to this article through an academic institution, please follow the link below to request a copy.