12 open source tools for natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years. There are a wide variety of open source NLP tools out there, so I decided to survey the landscape to help you plan your next voice- or text-based application. For this review, I focused on tools that use languages I'm familiar with, even though I'm not familiar with all the tools. (I didn't find a great selection of tools in the languages I'm not familiar with anyway.) That said, I excluded tools in three languages I am familiar with, for various reasons. The most obvious language I didn't include might be R, but most of the libraries I found hadn't been updated in over a year. That doesn't always mean they aren't being maintained well, but I think they should be getting updates more often to compete with other tools in the same space. I also chose languages and tools that are most likely to be used in production scenarios (rather than academia and research), and I have mostly used R as a research and discovery tool.

Devices: Indigo Igloo, Raspberry Pi Projects and Ibase

• AR-controlled robot could help people with motor disabilities with daily tasks

  Researchers employed the PR2 robot running Ubuntu 14.04 and an open-source Robot Operating System called Indigo Igloo for the study. The team made adjustments to the robot including padding metal grippers and adding “fabric-based tactile sensing” in certain areas.

• 5 IoT Projects You Can Do Yourself on a Raspberry Pi

  Are you new to the Internet of Things and wonder what IoT devices can do for you? Or do you just have a spare Raspberry Pi hanging around and are wondering what you can do with it? Either way, there are plenty of ways to put that cheap little board to work. Some of these projects are easy while others are much more involved. Some you can tackle in a day while others will take a while. No matter what, you’re bound to at least get some ideas looking at this list.

• Retail-oriented 21.5-inch panel PCs run on Kaby Lake and Bay Trail

  Ibase’s 21.5-inch “UPC-7210” and “UPC-6210” panel PCs run Linux or Windows on 7th Gen Kaby Lake-U and Bay Trail CPUs, respectively. Highlights include 64GB SSDs, mini-PCIe, mSATA, and IP65 protection.

NexDock 2 Turns Your Android Phone or Raspberry Pi into a Laptop

Ever wished your Android smartphone or Raspberry Pi was a laptop? Well, with the NexDock 2 project, now live on Kickstarter, it can be! Both the name and the conceit should be familiar to long-time gadget fans. The original NexDock was a 14.1-inch laptop shell with no computer inside. It successfully crowdfunded back in 2016. The OG device made its way in to the hands of thousands of backers. While competent enough, some of-the-time reviews were tepid about the dock’s build quality. After a brief stint fawning over Intel’s innovative (now scrapped) Compute Cards, the team behind the portable device is back with an updated, refined and hugely improved model.

Graphics: Libinput 1.13 RC2, NVIDIA and AMD

• libinput 1.12.902

  The second RC for libinput 1.13 is now available.
  
  This is the last RC, expect the final within the next few days unless
  someone finds a particulaly egregious bug.
  
  One user-visible change: multitap (doubletap or more) now resets the timer
  on release as well. This should improve tripletap detection as well as any
  tripletap-and-drag and similar gestures.
  
  valgrind is no longer a required dependency to build with tests. It was only
  used in a specific test run anyway (meson test --setup=valgrind) and not
  part of the regular build.
  
  As usual, the git shortlog is below.
  
  Benjamin Poirier (1):
        evdev: Rename button up and down states to mirror each other
  
  Feldwor (1):
        Set TouchPad Pressure Range for Toshiba L855
  
  Paolo Giangrandi (1):
        touchpad: multitap state transitions use the same timing used for taps
  
  Peter Hutterer (3):
        tools: flake8 fixes, typo fixes and missing exception handling
        meson.build: make valgrind optional
        libinput 1.12.902

• Libinput 1.13 RC2 Better Detects Triple Taps

  Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced the release of libinput 1.13 Release Candidate 2 on Thursday as the newest test release for this input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland Linux systems. Libinput 1.13 will be released in the days ahead as the latest six month update to this input library. But with the time that has passed, it's not all that exciting of a release as the Logitech high resolution scrolling support as well as Dell Totem input device support for the company's Canvas display was delayed to the next release cycle. But libinput 1.13 is bringing touch arbitration improvements for tablets, various new quirks, and other fixes and usability enhancements.

• Open-Source NVIDIA PhysX 4.1 Released

  Software releases are aplenty for GDC week and NVIDIA's latest release is their newest post-4.0 PhysX SDK. NVIDIA released the open-source PhysX 4.0 SDK just before Christmas as part of the company re-approaching open-source for this widely used physics library. Now the latest available is PhysX 4.1 and the open-source code drop is out in tandem.

• AMD have launched an update to their open source Radeon GPU Analyzer, better Vulkan support

  AMD are showing off a little here, with an update to the Radeon GPU Analyzer open source project and it sounds great.