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Category: NLP

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2026

02 Jun: Contributing to the taggedPBC

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you probably know that I’m interested in languages of the world. The incredible diversity in linguistic structures found in the roughly 7,000 wor.. (more)

19 May: The future will be automated

At my son’s birthday party some weeks ago I was talking to a few of the other parents while kids were playing, and, as it does these days, the subject of AI came up. Of the two dads I spoke to, both.. (more)

05 May: Data annotation for low-resource NLP

It’s that time of the semester where I’m in the throes of assessing student work for classes and trying to submit grades. One of my tasks has recently involved NLP projects related to the *taggedP.. (more)

20 Apr: Romanization of scripts and NLP resources

When I began developing the taggedPBC I needed to represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar way, in order to facilitate comparison. As noted in a previous post, while the majority of.. (more)

08 Apr: Comparing automated Implicit Motive models (tutorial)

Part of my research involves using machine learning and natural language processing to automate content coding. In social science there has long been recognition that humans make inferences about the .. (more)

10 Mar: Comparative data and localization

When working with actual language data, one major concern is how to represent that data. Many times as researchers the things we want to compare are not equivalent, so we must use the best approximati.. (more)

03 Mar: Motivational Computing: Automating implicit motives (new paper)

Some colleagues and I recently published a paper updating our progress on automating the coding of implicit motives. If you follow my blog and research, I’ve been working with psychologists on this .. (more)

16 Feb: A custom handler for faster-whisper on Huggingface

Recently we wanted to set up an audio transcription endpoint for our workflow with Bookscribe.ai. I’ve been using Huggingface in production for their accessible and low cost inference servers, but t.. (more)

09 Feb: Use (AI) agents or get left behind? A response

A couple of weeks ago I read a post by Tim Dettmers outlining how he has tried to use AI to automate various tasks, with some examples of successes and failures. While his attempt to automate email wr.. (more)

02 Feb: Word order from corpora: the taggedPBC (new paper)

My interest in languages has led to some interesting places, working on languages from different families in various contexts. Most recently I’ve been curious about the ways that languages develop ove.. (more)

26 Jan: Low-resource language processing (lessons from HG2051)

Since 2023 I’ve been teaching a course on natural language processing at NTU Singapore. The goal is for students to learn basic Python programming skills that allow them to work with language data. Ty.. (more)

19 Jan: Blog Post Generator (tutorial)

I recently read a post by Tim Dettmers on how he uses AI to support his workflow. In case you don’t know of Tim, his work on quantization has been foundational to how AI has developed over the past fe.. (more)

2025

22 May: The taggedPBC - a massive dataset for crosslinguistic investigations

About a year ago I was looking for annotated texts to investigate some questions I had about word order. My main question was whether it was possible to extract word order from corpora, but I realized.. (more)

2024

01 Feb: Some notes on LLMs in real-world contexts (Part 1)

Large language models (LLMs) seem to be all the rage these days, with the release of ChatGPT last year sparking a lot of conversation and interest. There have been quite a few efforts aimed at getting.. (more)

2023

08 Jun: Teaching ‘Language and the Computer’

Last semester I taught an introductory Natural Language Processing (NLP) course at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I wrote a thread about it on Twitter (now X) but here is a slightly expa.. (more)

2020

14 May: Automating the coding of implicit motives (Paper announcement)

The past week has been quite exciting, as we’ve been in the final stages of preparing a final manuscript on machine learning. I’ve been rather quiet about this collaboration since the end of 2017, wha.. (more)

2017

03 Dec: Neural Networks: Some lessons from text classification

I have been quite lax with posting here mainly because I have been working very hard on a difficult problem. My current job involves (among other things) trying to automate a psychological coding syst.. (more)