Emerging Computational Linguistics

I finished my MA degree at the University of Washington.  Many thanks to the faculty and staff that helped me finish.  Many thanks to my wife and family that supported me while I struggled through it.

However, this week I was reminded that there are limits to how much you can learn in a degree program that lasts only 5 quarters.   A blog at LingPipe (a review of my blog) (lingpipe-blog.com) pointed out several errors in what I had written about here in one of my posts.  Well, lucky for me I hadn’t intended the text to be submitted to a conference jury for review.  The paper was just a one-week assignment.  As I remember, I passed the class, so the paper probably met the requirements for the course even though it has very clear short comings in the eye of the LingPipe reviewer.

Maybe I will find the time to dig out the code that was used for that paper, and compare it against the evaluation at LingPipe and see if I can understand what the LingPipe objections were.  I might even try to re-implement the code following the expert’s directions.

Another way I look at this is: the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know.  It has been healthy for me to receive some constructive criticism of my post.  I have been writing software for only 30 years, so maybe in the next 30 years, I can learn how to fix the problems that LingPipe pointed out.  For now, I am just an average software engineer.  Code reviews are part of the process.

A list of references that are used on this site.

• Copestake, Ann.  2002.  Implementing Type Feature Structure Grammers.  CSLI Publications, Stanford.
• Gamallo, Pablo, Alexandre Agustini, and Gabriel P. Lopes.  2005.  Clustering Syntactic Positions with Similar Semantic Requirements.   Computational Linguistics, Vol 31,1  pp. 107-145.
• Green, Rebecca, Bonnie J. Dorr, and Philip Resnik.  2004. “Inducing Frame Semantic Verb Classes from WordNet and LDOCE”, in Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, 2004.
  ftp://ftp.umiacs.umd.edu/pub/bonnie/green-dorr-resnik.pdf
• Hindle, Donald. 1990. Noun Classification from predicate-argument structures.  in Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, 1990.  http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/acl/P/P90/P90-1034.pdf
• Lin, Dekang. 1998.  Automatic Retrieval and clustering of similar words.  COLING-ACL’98, pp. 768-774, Montreal.
  http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~lindek/papers/acl98.pdf
• O’Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller. 2005.  Contemporary Linguistics  An Introduction.  Bedford/St. Martin’s, New York. 
• Sag, Ivan A., Thomas Wasow, Emily M. Bender.  Syntactic Theory.  A Formal Introduction.  CSLI Publications.  Stanford.
• Weeds, Julie, and David Weir.  2005.  “Co-occurrence Retrieval: A Flexible Framework for Lexical Distributional Similarity”, Computational Linguistics, Vol 31,4 pp. 439-475.

We have two kittens, brother and sister that were rescued from living in the wild.  We named them Yahoo and Google.  Yahoo is the sister, she is reserved and cautious.  Google is the brother, he is ready for anything.

They are both very good search engines.

Our Search Engines

Emerging Computational Linguistics is a place to share ideas and information about this field that is a combination of human language and computer science.  The amount of research in this field is continuing to expand.  Twenty years from now, as we look back at the changes that have occurred in computers, CL will be one of the major contributors (if not the most important) to that change.

I am excited about Linguistics, Semantics and ways of interpretting them with computers.

If you have a question or comment about anything related to CL or anything on this site, please contact me at this email address (you’ll have to translate).

BobNew (at) EmergingCL (dot) com