I had expected to blog more during the last two weeks that I've been attending linguistics conferences but it didn't work out that way.
The week before last, I was in Brisbane at the Australia Linguistics Institute. My main motivation for going was that my PhD supervisor, Professor Andrew Spencer, was teaching a course there and so it was a great opportunity to finally meet face to face. I was explaining to him what I planned to do in my thesis and about a quarter of the way through, he stopped me and said: "there, that's your PhD thesis" :-)
Last week, I was in Sydney for the combined COLING-ACL conference on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Things have changed a bit in computational linguistics since I was an undergrad. In particular, it's a lot more generic machine learning and a lot less linguistics now. Researchers were boasting how good precision and recall scores they were getting "without any linguistic cleverness". I learnt a lot, though, and met some good people. I have a lot of new ideas for analyses I can perform on the Greek New Testament corpus too.
by : Created on July 24, 2006 : Last modified July 24, 2006 : (permalink)
Last night I joined the Linguistics Society of America.
The online form had a field I thought was cute: how, described in the International Phonetic Alphabet, I pronounce my name.
I entered ʤæɪmz tʰæʊbɘ.
It just occurs to me looking at it now that, although it's a fairly broad transcription, anyone who uses it to pronounce my name will temporarily be taking on an Australian accent :-)
by : Created on July 8, 2006 : Last modified July 8, 2006 : (permalink)
Thanks to a contribution from Willie Gollino, pyjamas is moving forward nicely. The dynamic table example from Google still isn't fully ported, but Willie has a nice grid example which is now checked in to the trunk.
In updating the unit tests to pass after his changes, I've been writing a little reporting tool that shows source code coverage, which tests pass and diffs between output and desired output when tests fail.
I plan to generate a report regularly on the website. Eventually, it might be nice to integrate the report as a Trac plugin.
by : Created on July 5, 2006 : Last modified July 5, 2006 : (permalink)
I was officially supposed to start on April 24th but I didn't receive the enrollment form until after that date (and after I'd left for the US). By the time I got the form, sent it to the UK, got details of where to wire the fee, etc, it was June. But as far as I know, I'm now officially enrolled.
The term ended June 30th so I guess I officially missed this term and am now on summer break before I've even started :-)
However, my supervisor, Professor Spencer, is running a course at the Australia Linguistics Institute in just over a week so my sister, Jenni, and I are flying to Brisbane to attend the Institute before flying down to Sydney to attend COLING.
Not only will Prof Spencer's course at ALI be a nice foundation for my PhD research, it will also be the first opportunity we've had to meet face-to-face.
by : Created on July 1, 2006 : Last modified July 1, 2006 : (permalink)