Support for combining your past writing with your current thinking
Written on 2015-07-13, discussing how to help my writing in the past combine with my current thinking.
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When I reread my past writings for some reason, I sometimes find myself thinking, "Oh, this is what I wrote, this can be applied to what I am thinking about now," and I wonder if this process can be enhanced by software or methodology.
There is a similar but different "Oh, I think I've written about this before, but where?".
We know it exists, we know where it exists, we know where it is.
I can see that it might be relevant, I can see that it is relevant, I can see the content.
Search engines will tell you where to find documents that may be relevant by searching for keywords that may be relevant.
What do you do when you don't realize that "if you search, you'll find something that might be relevant?" What if you don't know the keywords?
Hideki Kondo It is convenient to always talk to people and they will associate themselves with it! How does the person make the association? If we can find that out, a computer might be able to read everything and make the associations for us.
To put it in detail, the documents are term-vectored in advance, and the similarity of all combinations is calculated. When a document is presented, several documents with high similarity to it are also presented.
In the "when I present a document, I present a document that is highly similar to it" approach, you need to input a new verbalization of "what I am thinking about" in order to realize that it is useful for what I am thinking about right now. I was thinking "chicken and egg if that verbalization is what you want to support..." but when I think about it, you could just raise a few keywords. Maybe that's the right approach....
Tatsuo Yamashita Yes, yes. As for input, just make your thoughts into word vectors (i.e., multiple keywords) instead of sentences!
If you are Mr. Nishio, why don't you say something along the lines of "intellectual production techniques by word2vec" or "idea support by word2vec" or something along those lines? I thought about something like that, but I was bothered by the similarity between "Bag of Vectors" when the words are vectors...
Tatsuo Yamashita Why don't you just do it all?
There are some papers on word2vec to doc2vec, so I was wondering if there is a way to make it work. Well, maybe it will work in a wild way, such as averaging all the words in a document and making it the vector of the document.
How can we use the Wiki to enhance the "process of realizing that what we were thinking about in the past is useful for what we are thinking about now"?
Toshiyuki Masui Gyazz, you will see pages that use the same keywords, which may remind you of old ideas. I see, same keywords. Are those keywords extracted by morphological analysis or something? Are they added by humans?
Toshiyuki Masui A human being will put it on.
It's not so much the keywords as the page name. Since there is no distinction between page name and keywords.
I see. What I was envisioning now was a blog post or a post to Facebook, but even now, porting it to a wiki might be effective in strengthening future recall.
Toshiyuki Masui I have several thousand pages of my own, so I am warming to the idea.
By the way, what is this graphical thing?
Kohei Okubo How about evernote's function to suggest past related articles? ---
This page is auto-translated from /nishio/過去の自分の書き物と今の思考の結合支援 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I'm very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.