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2026

11 Aug: Gaussian Process for Areal controls in linguistic typology

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.. (more)

14 Jul: Maps from the taggedPBC: a Python tutorial

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.. (more)

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)

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)

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)

24 Mar: Git sparse checkout

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.. (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)

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)

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)

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)

12 Sep: ICAAL 7 Proceedings volume

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.. (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)

18 Aug: Open Science, Data, and Linguistics

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.. (more)