Category: Python
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2026
This is a blog post that I’ve had in mind for awhile, and as I
was working on it I realized that there is a bit of groundwork
needed. Part of that groundwork was laid in a previous post
where I showed..
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In a previous post I showed a simple way to control for
language family and area with categorical variables in a
linear mixed model using Python. In a more recent post I
showed how we can plot languag..
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When working with languages, it is important to keep in mind
the context in which they exist. While “context” has many
different facets, a primary aspect is geography. Geographical
(and topographi..
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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..
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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 ..
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I sometimes find myself wanting to work on a project involving
data or code from Github. Many such repositories are quite
small and easy to work with, containing mostly text files.
Occasionally, howev..
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When conducting comparative studies on linguistic features, we
are essentially observing patterns. In a previous post I
mentioned one problem we need to deal with, related to how we
represent the feat..
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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..
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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..
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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..
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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..
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2023
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..
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2018
The last post was a bit of a brain dump to make sure I didn’t
forget a few lessons I learned, in part because I knew I was
quitting the job that involved doing ML type things. While I
was working ther..
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2017
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..
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Recently, I started to explore using Git to maintain and
organize my data. This includes both the primary data I work
from as a linguist and the various kinds of data I produce in
the form of written ..
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This is the fourth installment in a series of blog posts where
I discuss some of the tools I use for linguistic analysis. In
a previous post I described the tools I use for processing and
converting v..
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In this third post about linguistic tools, I’ll be discussing
software that I use for acoustic analysis. Praat is one of the
premier acoustic analysis tools available for computers. While
there are pr..
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When I started my PhD program in Linguistics (language
documentation and description), I had some experience with
linguistic analysis, but not to the degree that I had to learn
in order to complete my..
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This is my first update in a long while, as I notice that this
blog hasn’t been updated since 2015. I blame life and the ease
of posting short updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Since my l..
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2014
This past week I’ve been attending a workshop on the
linguistic notion of Affectedness that my co-supervisor
Frantisek Kratochvil organized. It has really helped me think
about possible ways this feat..
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