Re:The Alien Space of Science
by martincsweiss on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:05PM
(#50213043)
Yes, vocab drift matters a lot. Most of the pipeline is basically compressing out any of the weird vocab/language stuff, so it doesn't have numbers and proper nouns and is in a sufficiently abstract concept space to cluster nicely. We use a density-based clustering method (HDBSCAN) which when you set min_samples=1 works as an online clustering (i.e., incrementally adding new things is the same as if you re-ran the clustering in batch mode).
It cost ballpark $250k
- Are there any issues with vocabulary drift? I know the LLM field in 2017 is not super different, but is there no atoms from 2017 that ended up being irrelevant to 2026 and/or which are just not possible to combine with more recent atoms?
- What does the cost of this project look like? (Ignoring the research iterations, just the costs relevant to the final product).