Software release: SNoW Learning Architecture

[Dan Roth]

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  Software release:      SNoW Learning Architecture 2.0 
                         Cognitive Computation Group
                         University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 
                         http://L2R.cs.uiuc.edu/~cogcomp/
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 The Cognitive Computation Group at the University of Illinois at
 Urbana/Champaign announces the release of the SNoW Learning
 Architecture (version 2.0).

 SNoW is a learning program that can be used as a general purpose
 multi-class classifier and is specifically tailored for learning in
 the presence of a very large number of features.  The learning
 architecture is a sparse network of linear units over a pre-defined
 or incrementally acquired feature space.  Several update rules may be
 used - sparse variations of the Winnow update rule, Perceptron, or
 naive Bayes.

 SNoW has been used successfully in several applications in the
 natural language and visual processing domains; the release is meant
 to be used only for research purposes, with the hope that it can be a
 useful research tool for studying learning in these domains.
 Feedback of any sort is welcome.

 You are invited to download the SNoW package for educational or
 non-commercial research purposes. When downloading the package you
 are asked to register and express your agreement with the license
 terms, under the university of Illinois guidelines.  SNoW is not
 shareware or public domain software.

 The SNoW software package can be downloaded by following the
 `Software' link under the Cognitive Computation group home page at
 http://L2R.cs.uiuc.edu/~cogcomp

  The SNoW package contains the following:

 - Source code (C++) with a Makefile.
 - A user guide (UIUC Tech Report, UIUC-DCS-R-99-210) containing brief
   description of the architecture and algorithms, detailed
   descriptions of the command-line options, and a brief tutorial.
 - The text of the license agreement.

  Two packages are available, one for UNIX system (that should be
  easily installed also on most Linux systems) and a second for NT
  systems.

  The User guide (UIUC Tech report UIUC-DCS-R-99-210, by Andrew
  J. Carlson, Chad M. Cumby, Jeff L. Rosen and Dan Roth) can be
  downloaded directly from:   
  http://L2R.cs.uiuc.edu/~danr/Papers/userguide.ps.gz

  Papers related to SNoW can be found at
  http://L2R.cs.uiuc.edu/~danr/snow.html

  For comments and bug reports relating to SNoW, please send mail to

                   SNoW at cs.uiuc.edu 

 
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Dan Roth
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign
1304 W. Springfield Ave.                            Urbana IL 61801
Phone: (217) 244-7068   (217) 244-6813 (Sec)   Fax: +(217) 244-6500
e-mail: danr at cs.uiuc.edu               http://L2R.cs.uiuc.edu/~danr
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