Category: Data
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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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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..
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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..
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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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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 ..
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Most of my fieldwork research on minority languages has been
conducted within the Austroasiatic (AA) family. This is a
group of languages spoken by diverse peoples across South
& Southeast Asia, and w..
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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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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..
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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..
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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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2025
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..
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2024
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..
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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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2020
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..
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2019
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..
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Planting rice near Jowai, NE India At the end of last year the
ICAAL 7 proceedings volume was published by University of
Hawai’i Press as a special issue of the Journal of the
South-East Asian Lingui..
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2018
I just returned from fieldwork in Myanmar, where we spent
several days training staff and students at two different
universities (Mandalay University and Yangon University of
Foreign Languages) in fie..
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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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One of the concerns that has occupied my mind for that past
few years is the question of data accessibility in the field
of Linguistics. I am happy to announce that the data that
underpins my grammati..
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In a previous post I discussed some of the benefits I
discovered in using LaTeX with LyX as a front-end. Another
extremely useful tool to learn how to use is a Bibliography
manager. If you are like I..
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My next post was intended to be about streamlining a workflow
by using various LaTeX authoring tools and a bibliography
manager, but last week my Mac died. It is an older computer
admittedly (from 201..
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Along the lines of some of my previous posts on tools for
linguistic analysis, I thought I’d post a quick update on a
Praat script I’ve been working on. While not part of the
series of posts I’ve been..
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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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When you discuss doing language documentation and description,
one of the first things to know is that you have to collect
language data. The primary source of language data is people
who speak the la..
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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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Recently I’ve been thinking about what I wish I knew about PhD
study before I began. When you start out to do a PhD, there
are many things you have to learn that are not necessarily
directly related t..
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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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For the past week or so I’ve been working on getting my corpus
of transcribed and translated texts into shape. The word
corpus is from the Latin word meaning “body”, and in
this case refers to a “bo..
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2013
I am back in Singapore! It’s been a crazy few weeks, and I’m
still recovering from jet lag, one reason I haven’t posted
much recently or sent out an email. My Granddad on my mother’s
side passed away ..
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