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Remembering September 11 Linguistic mapping: overlapping polygons with points Food of the world: Three Sisters stew Gaussian Process for Areal controls in linguistic typology Food of the world: Uzbek Plov

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Category: Comparison

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2026

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)

17 Mar: Controlling for Descent and Area in linguistic typology

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.. (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)

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)

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)

2019

16 Sep: Computer-assisted syntactic reconstruction

Things have been quite busy over the last year or so, when I last posted. My wife and I moved to Zurich with our 4-month old, I helped organize a workshop on word order here at UZH, a proceedings volu.. (more)

2018

21 Feb: Moving to Zurich

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.. (more)