Category: Programming
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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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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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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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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
As you might have observed, I recently updated my website.
Although it’s been on my mind for awhile, I finally got around
to it because I had a good template to follow and I’ve learned
enough about bu..
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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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2018
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
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..
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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
As I’ve been working with code to try and do some programming
to get the computer to format my text properly, I’ve run into
some issues. It’s got me thinking… You know how computers
think… wait, y..
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