Month: May 2011

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-29

    whoa; LC axing MARC. A lot of attention thrown at NLP — guess I'll have work for a while. http://tinyurl.com/3rj47yp (via @amandafrench) # Attn @blackwingedboy @moosepajamas "Video of the day. RT @beautyislikeyea This kid is so lucky. http://t.co/jvRhx3l" via @stevesilberman # RT @mrfaulty "They tricked me into believing facts which are already true and somewhat…

  • Norvig says it better

    Those who got fired up about Chomsky’s difficult comments regarding empiricism, including myself, will be gratified to see that Peter Norvig, patron saint of data-driven computational linguistics (inter alia), has released his own comments, along the same lines as mine, only better researched, more broadly researched, more respectful, more thorough, and, well, coming from the keyboard…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-22

    NLP/linguistics/machine-learning folks: who's doing interesting work in Yale or New Haven that I should talk to, were I to visit? # Up way too early to go run across the city with thousands of other people. #b2b100 # Done! Approx 65 min. For a 9min mile pace: not bad for no training. # there are…

  • Gauss is my shepherd

    So this happened: I said this over on Twitter, but it’s too good not to record again here: The alt-text suggests that Munroe’s EM draws Gods from a normal distribution. (A Gaussian!) (did you know there’s an entire website dedicated to explaining XKCD to the great unwashed?  I think if you have to explain it, it’s…

  • Character encodings – a short tutorial

    There is a huge profusion of terms around sets of letters, symbols, and characters and how they are encoded onto computers. I found myself embroiled in this mess working at a speech-technology company back in the day as we struggled to adapt a speech recognizer designed for English to cope with Korean — which turns…

  • Bay to Breakers, followup

    I bicycled to the Embarcadero early this morning to the start of the Bay to Breakers, and ran it (on foot, taking Muni back to the Embarcadero after) in a personal record time of 1:04:47 (last year: 1:14:04).  According to the RFID timer reports on the race website, that’s: an 8:42 mile pace; 93rd percentile…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-15

    First day on site at a new (old) job! Already talking about parallelization, machine learning, linguist/engineer contact, and more. # For the p.m. crowd (a.m. in Europe): New Trochaism: Chomsky and "walks like a duck" empiricism https://trochee.net/2011/05/walks-like-a-duck/ # GET reports on Kenobi covert action, via @stevesilberman : http://wrd.tw/khyZID ("Too soon?" he says) nails it. the…

  • Bay to Breakers 2011

    I’ve signed up for Bay to Breakers 2011 on Sunday. It’s the 100th Bay to Breakers race across San Francisco.  I’m in Corral C (criterion: 12km under 90 minutes), which isn’t pushing too hard. Unfortunately, at least one of the people who was supposed to run with me is making noises about backing out (“debilitating…

  • Where’s Jeremy?

    Many of you know (or have inferred from my LinkedIn or Twitter updates), but let me point it out explicitly here: I’m working for this summer as a Research Linguist at SRI International, in the same STAR lab that hosted me as a Visiting Fellow while I finished my Ph.D. It’s interesting, diverse work —…

  • Chomsky and “walks like a duck” empiricism

    Replicated Typo and @jasonbaldridge inter alia have been discussing a recent forum where Chomsky and Minsky and Labov (among others) met to discuss the past and future of artificial intelligence. Replicated Typo points out the most interesting contribution from Chomsky: Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that…