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.)

25 October 2007

Non-parametric versus model selection/averaging

Non-parametric approaches (probably the most familiar of which is the Dirichlet process, but there are a whole host of them) are nice becaus...

19 October 2007

Gender and text, gender and speech

For some crazy reason I decided a while ago that I wanted to learn Japanese. Essentially, I wanted to learn a language as unlike English as...

04 October 2007

F-measure versus Accuracy

I had a bit of a revelation a few years ago. In retrospect, it's obvious. And I'm hoping someone else out there hasn't realize...

27 September 2007

Bootstrapping

There are many bootstrapping algorithms, but they all have (roughly) the same general form. Suppose we want to solve a binary classificatio...

20 September 2007

Mark-up Always the Wrong Tree?

Almost a year ago I responded to a very interesting article in CL. The substance of the article is that we have to be careful when we anno...

11 September 2007

Journals are on the Mind

Anyone who has ever read this blog before knows that I'm a huge supporter of moving our Computational Linguistics journal to open access...

05 September 2007

Word order and what-not

I've recently been looking at some linguistic issues related to word order phenomena. This is somewhat inline with the implicational un...

28 August 2007

The Hierarchical Bayes Compiler

I've been working for a while on a compiler for statistical models. (Those of you who knew me back in the day will know that I used to ...

21 August 2007

Topic modeling: syntactic versus semantic

Topic modeling has turned into a bit of a cottage industry in the NLP/machine learning world. Most seems to stem from latent Dirichlet allo...

08 August 2007

Conferences: Costs and Benefits

I typically attend two or three conferences per year; usually NIPS (which has been in Vancouver since I started attending), and an ACL-relat...

01 August 2007

Explanatory Models

I am frequently asked the question: why does your application for solving XXX make such and such an error? (You can easily replace "yo...

19 July 2007

What's the Use of a Crummy Translation?

I'm currently visiting Microsoft Research Asia (in Beijing) for two weeks (thanks for having me, guys!). I speak basically no Chinese. ...

12 July 2007

Multiclass learning as multitask learning

It's bugged me for a little while that when learning multiclass classifiers, the prior on weights is uniform (even when they're lear...

08 July 2007

Collapsed Gibbs

(The contents of this post are largely due to a conversation with Percy Liang at ACL.) I'm a big fan of Gibbs sampling for Bayesian prob...

02 July 2007

ACL and EMNLP 2007 Report

ACL/EMNLP just concluded. Overall, I thought both conferences were a success, though by now I am quite ready to return home. Prague was ve...

26 June 2007

ACL Business Meeting Results

This afternoon here in Prague was the ACL business meeting. A few interesting points were brought up. As well all know, ACL will be in Col...

17 June 2007

3 Small Newses

(Yeah, I know, "news" isn't a count noun.) WhatToSee has been updated with ACL and EMNLP 2007, so figure out what talks you w...

11 June 2007

First-best, Balanced F and All That

Our M.O. in NLP land is to evaluate our systems in a first-best setting, typically against a balanced F measure (balanced F means that preci...

05 June 2007

Tracking the State of the Art

I just received the following email from Yoav Goldberg: I believe a resource well needed in the ACL community is a "state-of-the-art-re...

01 June 2007

Open Access CL Proposal

Following up on the Whence JCLR discussion, Stuart Shieber, Fernando Pereira, Ryan McDonald, Kevin Duh and I have just submitted a proposal...

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hal

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