Nicholas Locascio

Nicholas Locascio, Karthik Narasimhan, Eduardo DeLeon et al.

This paper explores the task of translating natural language queries into regular expressions which embody their meaning. In contrast to prior work, the proposed neural model does not utilize domain-specific crafting, learning to translate directly from a parallel corpus. To fully explore the potential of neural models, we propose a methodology for collecting a large corpus of regular expression, natural language pairs. Our resulting model achieves a performance gain of 19.6% over previous state-of-the-art models.

Harini Suresh, Nicholas Locascio

Topic models are a way to discover underlying themes in an otherwise unstructured collection of documents. In this study, we specifically used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model on a dataset of Yelp reviews to classify restaurants based off of their reviews. Furthermore, we hypothesize that within a city, restaurants can be grouped into similar "clusters" based on both location and similarity. We used several different clustering methods, including K-means Clustering and a Probabilistic Mixture Model, in order to uncover and classify districts, both well-known and hidden (i.e. cultural areas like Chinatown or hearsay like "the best street for Italian restaurants") within a city. We use these models to display and label different clusters on a map. We also introduce a topic similarity heatmap that displays the similarity distribution in a city to a new restaurant.