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.)

27 December 2007

Those Darn Biologists...

I've recently been talking to a handful of biologists. The lab/bench kind, not the computational kind. As an experiment in species obs...

18 December 2007

Particle filtering versus beam search

I had a very interesting discussion at NIPS with Vikash Mansingka about beam search and particle filtering . Much of what is below is a re...

12 December 2007

NIPS retrospective

I got back from NIPS on Sunday; sadly I got sick on the last day. Despite this, it was by far my most productive conference ever . Admitt...

30 November 2007

Domain adaptation vs. transfer learning

The standard classification setting is a input distribution p(X) and a label distribution p(Y|X). Roughly speaking, domain adaptation (DA) ...

23 November 2007

NIPS 2007 Pre-prints Up (and WhatToSee-d)

NIPS 2007 preprints are online, with a big warning that they're not final versions. Be that as it may, I've indexed them on WhatTo...

19 November 2007

Translation out of English

If you look at MT papers published in the *ACL conferences and siblings, I imagine you'll find a cornucopia of results for translating i...

15 November 2007

NetFlix "solved" (the small version)

See the post on Hunch . Maybe that last 1.5% might benefit not from fancy ML, but from fancy (or even stupid) NLP. "But what data do ...

12 November 2007

Understanding Model Predictions

One significant (IMO) issue that we face when attempting to do some sort of feature engineering is trying to understand not only what sorts ...

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. ...

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