I had a lot of fun playing with words at the monthly Python User group meeting in San Diego this week. Congratulations to Torin Panick @torrinp for winning a free copy of NLP in Action. For those of you that missed out, I’ll give out one free eBook code and a 42% discount code next time. And I’ll be a bit more organized about the competition ;).

The slides and code are here if you want to try your own tip-of-the-tongue game: PDF ODP py

If you’re wondering, a “nessvector” isn’t a real NLP thing. That’s just what I call an explainable word vector that has your own custom “dimensions”. The examples we used during the meetup had dimensions for “peopleness”, “animalness”, “placeness”, and “femaleness”:

>>> nessvector('cat')
placeness     -1.560885
peopleness    -0.216057
animalness     2.906886
conceptness   -1.442183
femaleness     0.312240

Lots of animalness femaleness (femininity) and not any placeness at all.

What do you think a “dog” nessvector will look like? More or less femininity than a cat?

>>> nessvector('dog')
placeness     -1.453316
peopleness    -0.589015
animalness     3.112393
conceptness   -1.225242
femaleness     0.155180

What about “herb”?

>>> nessvector('herb')
placeness     -0.340492
peopleness     0.036387
animalness     0.647465
conceptness   -0.356363
femaleness     0.013003

And for the 20 questions game, what about “tiger”?

>>> nessvector('tiger')
placeness     -1.283883
peopleness    -0.140355
animalness     2.350045
conceptness   -1.342111
femaleness     0.416304