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Food of the world: Three Sisters stew Gaussian Process for Areal controls in linguistic typology Food of the world: Uzbek Plov Determining language areas in linguistic typology Food of the world: Chakalaka

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Programming (17) NLP (15) World languages (13) Teaching (12) Food (10) Fieldwork (10) Cultures (10) Guide (9) Typology (6) Low-resource languages (5)

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2026

21 Aug: Food of the world: Three Sisters stew

As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I’ve been cooking food from a region of the world that we discuss, so students get an idea of pos.. (more)

05 Aug: Food of the world: Uzbek Plov

As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I have been cooking food from the part of the world we’re discussing that week. The goal is to gi.. (more)

22 Jul: Food of the world: Chakalaka

As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food from a region of the world that we’re discussing in that week, so that students can g.. (more)

01 Jul: Food of the world: Koprová Omáčka

This week’s post is a recipe from Europe. As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food from a linguistic group represented in that wee.. (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 implicit.. (more)

15 Jun: Food of the world: Kaima Bona Gatoi

I’ve been on holiday and so missed posting a blog for last week, but this week I again have a post about food. As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at N.. (more)

26 May: Food of the world: Nasi Lemak

This week’s post is a recipe from the insular south-east Asian region of the world. As part of the “Food of the World” segment in my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore, I cook food f.. (more)

12 May: Food of the world: South Indian Dal

As part of my series on “Food of the World”, I’ve been writing up the recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore. It’s a course that gives an overview of world.. (more)

29 Apr: Food of the world: Ainu soup

As part of my series on “Food of the World”, I’ve been writing up the recipes for food I cook for my “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore. It’s a course that gives an overview of world.. (more)

15 Apr: Food of the world: Jollof Rice

As I noted in a previous post, food is part and parcel of any fieldwork experience. My “Languages of the World” course at NTU Singapore gives an overview of world languages, highlighting theories .. (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)

2024

01 Feb: Some notes on LLMs in real-world contexts (Part 1)

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.. (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 expa.. (more)

2017

03 Aug: Bibliography Management (BibDesk)

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.. (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 la.. (more)

23 Feb: 4 Practical Tips for Pursuing A PhD

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.. (more)

2015

20 Dec: Hanvon e920 Review: Part 1

The last year has been quite busy - I completed my PhD, got hired on a 1-year contract as a postdoctoral Research Fellow, and have since returned to India and done many other things. Needless to say, .. (more)

2014

23 Jul: Andaman Languages

I mentioned that Dr. Anvita Abbi gave a great talk at the Himalayan Languages Symposium on her work on Great Andaman in the Indian Ocean. Here’s a map just to show you where that is. credit: [B.. (more)

2013

25 Feb: Feature: the Andreola sisters

I first met Yolanda and her sister Sophia in Quarryville, PA, at the Coffee Bean, a small coffee shop in the town, back in 2006 when I was starting to play shows in the Lancaster area. I got to know t.. (more)