word cloud

plural word clouds · alternative wordcloud

1. A graphic shape composed of words, typically in a variety of sizes and fonts, with the size of each term often reflecting factors such as its frequency of use in a set of documents or survey responses; such displays are sometimes treated as linguistic data visualizations, sometimes used as part of a quiz or game, and sometimes merely decorative.

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   Suppose you train two neural networks on English and French. Each gleans the structure of its respective language, developing an internal representation known as a latent space. Essentially, it is a word cloud: a map of all the associations that words have in that language, built by placing similar words near one another and unrelated words farther apart. The cloud has a distinctive shape. In fact, it is the same shape for both languages because, for their all their differences, they ultimately refer to the same world. All you need to do is rotate the English and French word clouds until they align. […] “Without having a dictionary, by looking at the constellation of all the words embedded in the latent spaces for each language, you only have to find the right rotation to align all the dots,” Kanai says.

   2024 March 19, George Musser, “A Truly Intelligent Machine. [Online title and tagline: "Building Intelligent Machines Helps Us Learn How Our Brain Works. Designing machines to think like humans provides insight into intelligence itself"]”, in Scientific American, volume 330, number 4, →DOI, archived from the original on 11 Apr 2024, pages 31-36