Outgrowing Brendan Eich’s orders of mission, scope, clojure, prototyping, asynchronicity, ES6 and more great libs turned javascript into a red hot IT topic. Let’s synthesize this wealth and build an evolution where only functionalities and expressed intentions matter. Get ready for neural fun!!!

1. Designing a NLP based
Multipurpose Javascript Extension
#FrontConf alain.lompo@senacor.com #alainlompo

2. About me
 Alain Lompo
 Software developer at Senacor
 Working on eBanking agile projects
 Currently using
Java/JEE or Spring boot in the backend
Angular/React on the frontend (with javascript of course)
Worked a lot previously with .Net technologies
MCSD .Net / MCT, …
Also old times MVP (Windows System / Biztalk Server),

3. Plan
Motivation
The javascript phenomenon:
How to build a javascript extension
Natural language processing: core concepts
Demo
Deep learning and neural networks in javascript
Demo
Wrapping up

4. Motivation
 It would be awesome to be able to communicate precise
intent to our IDE or Webapp through natural language
instructions
 Wether they come through text typing or vocal commands
 It could make of programming in general and web development
in particular a more attractive discipline
 Productive level software development would be accessible to
more disabled people
 …

5. The javascript phenomenon
 Javascript is taking over everything
 They nevertheless hate it…?
 Syndrome of Stockholm?
 Is javascript still weird?

6. Javascript is taking over everything
I ran a software business for a couple of years. I got bought and
Right now I am developing the very product I used to sell. My former
Employees put AngularJs and Node.js in there. I remember my conversation
3 years ago with my best engineer. he said that javascript was taking over
Everything. I though „Wow. They managed to fix that horrible language“

7. Javascript is taking over everything

8. They nevertheless hate it…?
At my new company, everyone was pretending that JS was alright.
I got tired and spoke up. Turns out, deep down they all hated JS,
it was just crowd thinking. Now they all hate JS.
And we’re waiting impatiently for Web Assembly.

9. Stockholm syndrome…?
Of all the supportive messages I’ve received over the years,
this is one of my favourites. It confirms what I knew all along:
that JavaScript programmers have been mind-fucked
into thinking that JavaScript is a good programming language.
The president speaks of “mass psychosis”
and “crowd thinking” but I’ve used the analogy of Stockholm syndrome
and cult psychology. Think Patty Hearst and Scientology.

10. Is javascript still weird?
 YES !!!
 Fail silently at runtime
 Callback hell (worked around with promises)
 Weak typing
 And many more… (https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs)
 But constantly improving
 Jslint, Eslint, Tslint and similar linters…
 The use of new libraries that help reduce the weirdness
 The improvements from the last standard releases of javascripts
 And many more… (https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript)

11. How to build a js extension
 How easy is that?
 Major goals of an extension
 Using functions and templates

12. How easy is that?
 It can be very easy with a little bit of discipline
 The DOM manipulations capabilities make the language
powerful
 Allmost everything can be achieved with pure javascript
functionalities

13. Major goals of an extension
 Zero external dependencies (as less as possible otherwise)
 Reusability and easy to use
 Efficiency (minimal size and processing load)

14. DOM manipulation abilities
// Listening to events
document.getElementById("viewerId").addEventListener
("click", this.viewerZoomIn);
// Dynamically update any attribute of any element
document.getElementById("previewerId").src = ...
// Directly enrich html content
var firstLevelHeading =
document.createElement("h1");
var headingText = document.createTextNode("Bird eye
preview");
firstLevelHeading.appendChild(headingText);
document.body.appendChild(firstLevelHeading);

15. NLP core concepts
NLP is not a theory but rather a model
It is a generative and not a repair model
It strives to detect the structure behind human language
To the contrary to the human conscious mind, modern CPUs
are potentially limitless (availability of computational power)

16. The challenge of ambiguity
 It originates from
 Words with multiple definitions (the same word means
something else depending on the context)
 Long sentences

17. Structuring the language
 Uses the parse (or syntactic) tree
 Originates in generative grammar
 Sentences in any language are being generated by a set of rules
 Any grammatical sentence can be generated by these rules
 Any non – grammatical sentence weren’t and can’t be generated by them

18. Structuring the language…
S
N
the N
cat
V
ran
PV
in N
the N
kitchen

19. DEMOS
The power of compromise

20. Deep learning and neural networks in javascript
 Deep learning and javascript should go hand in hand
 Javascript is crossplatform, therefore deep learning apps
will run on more platforms
Will reach a wider audience
Will become more visual and interactive
Will benefit from one of the biggest realistic data source
possible
 On the other hand, deep learning
Will help make web apps more (artificially…) intelligent

21. More advantages of web deep learning
Reduced server costs
Lowered inference latency
Data privacy
Instant GPU acceleration
Instant access (no complex or constraining setup required)

22. Deep learning
Neural networks
Machine learning
Artificial intelligence
Symbolic AI
Kernel methods
Decision trees
Shallow
Neural
Network
…
…
Machine learning Venn diagram

23. The machine learning paradigm
Training Inference
Training phase Inference phase
Data
Answers
Model architecture
Rules
New data
Answer

24. General approach
 Reading/Training dataset
 Defining the neural network architecture
 Defining the loss function and optimiser method
 Training the neural network based on data batches
 Evaluating the performances over the test data

25. Demo
Azure text analytics

26. Demos (wit.ai)

27. Wrapping up
 Javascript has come a long way from its initial design and
intent
 It is now one of the most popular programming language
 Though it retains many of its original flaws/weirdness it is
made stronger by a very strong open source community
 Being cross platform and offering a huge amount of real life
datas, it is a perfect fit for deep learning

28. Wrapping up
 Already many extensions are provided by the community to
allow NLP with javascript such as:
Compromise
Superscriptjs
Dialogflow
Azure text analytics
Retextjs
Opennlp (with its nodejs wrapper: node opennlp)

29. THANK YOU !

30. QUESTIONS ?

31. Resources
 https://github.com/spencermountain/compromise
 https://github.com/superscriptjs/superscript
 https://github.com/superscriptjs/superscript/wiki/Installing
 https://github.com/silentrob/hello-superscript
 http://kmtabish.com/articles/NLP/
 https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs-examples.git
 www.superscriptjs.com
 https://github.com/superscriptjs/superscript
 https://dialogflow.com
 https://github.com/retextjs/retext
 https://spacy.io
 https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural

32. Resources
 Citations from: https://hackernoon.com/the-javascript-phenomenon-is-a-mass-psychosis-
57adebb09359
 https://wit.ai/getting-started