Back from ALI and COLING-ACL

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.