natural language processing blog

my biased thoughts on the fields of natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics (CL) and related topics (machine learning, math, funding, etc.)

29 September 2006

Doing DP Clustering? Don't Sample!

Dirichlet process techniques are increasingly popular tools for Bayesian analysis. There's not enough space here to describe how they w...

23 September 2006

Humor is Hard

Several months ago I became temporarily interested in trying to automatically identify if entries in online discussions are informative, int...

17 September 2006

Statistical NLP is not NLP but just Statistics?

bact' brings up an interesting point, perhaps more provocative than my original (intended-to-be provocative) pseudo-question. To quote...

08 September 2006

Multilingual = Not Lingual at All?

There has been a trend for quite some time now toward developing algorithms and techniques to be applicable to a wide range of languages. E...

26 August 2006

NLG on NPR

I heard a story on NPR while driving today that referenced a recent Financial Times story about the use of natural language generation tec...

25 August 2006

Doing Named Entity Recognition? Don't optimize for F₁

(Guest post by Chris Manning . Thanks Chris!) Among ML-oriented nlpers, using a simple F 1 of precision and recall is the standard way to ...

24 August 2006

Machine learning has failed[?.]

When I was visiting Singapore, Lan Man gave a talk at NUS right before mine (for extra fun, try to find her web site without using my link!...

18 August 2006

Change of Notation

Ed Hovy has a particular label he assigns to a large variety of work in NLP: it performs a change of notation . The canonical example is P...

13 August 2006

Human in the Loop Learning

What we, as NLPers, typically do vis-a-vis machine learning is what might be called "Human in the Loop" machine learning. Why? T...

04 August 2006

Future DUC Tasks

The Document Understanding Conference features a yearly summarization competition. For the past few years, the task has been query-focused...

28 July 2006

Loss versus Conditional Probability

There was a talk in the session I chaired at ACL about directly optimizing CRFs to produce low F-scores for problems like NE tagging and ch...

25 July 2006

Preprocessing vs. Model

Back from Sydney now, and despite being a bit jetlagged, I thought I'd begin with an COLING/ACL-related post. There was a paper presen...

15 July 2006

Where are Interesting Learning Problems in NLP?

I just spent a few days visiting Yee Whye and NUS ( photos to prove it!). YW and I talked about many things, but one that stood out as a...

13 July 2006

Conference Formats

There are two conference formats I'm familiar with. One is typified by ACL and ICML; the other by NIPS. The ACL format is a roughly 3 ...

Visa Problems entering USA?

Some people are trying to do something about it (contacting congressmen, etc.). If you've had problems entering the US for conferences, ...

07 July 2006

What is Natural Language Understanding?

I've read lots of papers and seen lots of talks that justify a task as being useful to doing "natural language understanding."...

03 July 2006

My Thesis Path

(Minor note: the latest version of the EDT section didn't get folded in properly to the version of the thesis that went up yesterday; t...

02 July 2006

Thesis is Done!

I'm happy to announce that my thesis, Practical Structured Learning Techniques for Natural Language Processing , is now done (which is g...

27 June 2006

Beating an N-Gram

Our entry into the NIST MT eval this year has a recapitalization component, currently being done by a large language model (500mb, gzipped) ...

19 June 2006

Having an Impact

Having just completed my thesis, I've been thinking a lot about what directions I should persue, post-graduation. While I'll proba...

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hal

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