Category: Research
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2026
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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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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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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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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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
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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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’ to..
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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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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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2015
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, ..
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The last few months I’ve been a bit lax in posting, in part
because things have been quite busy. In January I presented at
a workshop in Nijmegen, and most of February-April was spent
editing and resu..
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2014
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 of funding ..
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2013
I recently had the opportunity to attempt to condense my PhD
thesis topic into 3 minutes as part of the 3-minute thesis
challenge here at NTU. I made it into the final where I
competed with other spea..
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Wandering salesman inscribing pens on the train. I made it
safely to Kathmandu this week, via train from Guwahati to
Gorakhpur, then north to the Nepal border and by bus to Tansen
for a couple days to..
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I’ve been in Australia (affectionately known by locals as Oz
or ’stralia) for almost 3 weeks, and so far it’s been
fabulous. People are friendly, food is good and I’ve already
seen 2 incredible firewo..
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