Category: Linguistics

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 showe.. (more)

28 Jul: Determining language areas in linguistic typology

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 langua.. (more)

14 Jul: Maps from the taggedPBC: a Python tutorial

Linguistic maps 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. Geogra.. (more)

24 Jun: SSM 2026 Conference

I recently attended the annual conference of the Society for the Science of Motivation (SSM) in Barcelona. Joyce was presenting a paper about our recent work automating subcategory coding for implici.. (more)

05 May: Data annotation for low-resource NLP

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 in.. (more)

20 Apr: Romanization of scripts and NLP resources

Romanization of scripts and NLP resources !Language scripts (from Freepik )
When I began developing the taggedPBC I needed to represent all of the roughly 2,000 languages in a similar wa.. (more)

08 Apr: Comparing automated Implicit Motive models (tutorial)

Comparing Implicit Motive Models Part of my research involves using machine learning and natural language processing to automate content coding. In social science there has long been recognition tha.. (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 fea.. (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 approximat.. (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)

23 Feb: Austroasiatic linguistics YouTube channel

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 .. (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 ov.. (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. T.. (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 exp.. (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

!Picture 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 A.. (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 t.. (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 s.. (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 gramm.. (more)

16 Jun: LaTeX and LyX for (thesis) writing

One of the first things I did after passing my PhD confirmation exercise (like a qualifying exam in the USA) was to research the best way to write my thesis. As a side note, I use the word ‘thesis’.. (more)

06 May: Analyze tone and plot: A Praat script for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing or plotting F0 (pitch) tracks

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.. (more)

24 Apr: Using Git for Linguistics

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 .. (more)

12 Apr: Grammatical Analysis: the Transcriber-Toolbox workflow

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.. (more)

26 Mar: Praat and scripts: an introduction

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.. (more)

13 Mar: Recording and Processing linguistic data

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.. (more)

05 Mar: Linguistic Tools (Mac/PC)

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.. (more)

16 Feb: February 2017 Update

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.. (more)

2014

31 Aug: Thesis Submitted!

!Picture I finally submitted my PhD thesis last week. It has been a crazy final month. The reason I had that deadline was that here in Singapore (at least at NTU) all PhD students are given 4 years o.. (more)

29 Jul: Deictic Demonstratives (Contd.)

!Pnar deictic demonstratives In my last post I discussed the concept of deixis and illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar. Pnar’s deictic demonstrative system combines gender clitics with large.. (more)

26 Jul: Deictic Demonstratives

At the Himalayan Languages Symposium last week I gave a talk about deixis. This grammatical feature is essentially ‘pointing’, and words or morphemes in language can point to various things, so gramma.. (more)

02 Apr: Corpus

!Picture 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 re.. (more)

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