Blog

These posts describe everything I put out here that is not yet published in any other form. Usually, the content is about projects that I do in my spare time or just implementations of techniques that I find interesting.

Some of the articles are unfinished and will be updated later.

Mining the Bundestag, 22 Jan. 2023 (posts)

Did you know that the german parliament publishes protocols of all of its proceedings in PDF format? It is relatively straight-forward to download and parse them, so we can easily collect a dataset of transcripts of what seems to be every speech in the Bundestag since the second world war. My original idea was to mine the speeches for word associations: some words will be associated with other words, based on the intended connotation, and this association might change over time as the connotations change.

Categories: Data Mining
1032 Words, Tagged with: Bundestag
Mining tagesschau.de, 26 Nov. 2022 (posts)

I like to read tagesschau.de, so I wrote a script to scrape it in regular intervals. My original goal was to determine which articles stay on the front page the longest, which ones allow commenting (a feature that seems to have been disabled almost entirely since March 2020), and if articles are modified after the initial release (without mentioning this), because I sometimes feel that headlines change. Dataset Creation Tagesschau.de provides a JSON API, so the “scraping” is relatively straight forward and can be done with just a few lines of code.

Categories: Data Mining
982 Words, Tagged with: Tagesschau · Generative Models · Data Mining
Filter Visualization, 27 Jul. 2022 (posts)

What is Filter Visualization? Deep Neural Networks are often seen as a black-box: they map some input to some output, and we can make them do this surprisingly well. However, we usually have no idea how this mapping works. Why would we want to do it? Visualizing filters can help us to get an understandin of what the neural network is doing. The method can also be used to identify filters that are not required for the model, because they are copies of other filters, or compute not valuable features at all.

Categories: Deep Learning
370 Words, Tagged with: Deep Learning · Introspection · Explainability
Social Work Research Map (SWORM), 13 Jul. 2022 (posts)

During the last weeks, I worked with some colleagues on a website that aims to improve access to social work literature. There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

Categories: Data Mining
37 Words, Tagged with: SWORM · Data Mining