Category: World
← Return to Blog Index
2026
25 years ago, on September 11, 2001, a lot of people lost
their lives to a war they didn’t know existed, attacked by
individuals with an ideology that made them willing to die to
destroy what they s..
(more)
I recently had a colleague ask me about how to represent
language areas for one language group alongside other
languages spoken in the area. The observation was that many
languages with a small number..
(more)
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)
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)
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..
(more)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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..
(more)
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)
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)
The diversity of the world’s languages is driven by a number
of factors that are still not well understood. However, there
is clearly some influence from environment and other kinds of
context. When..
(more)
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)
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)
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..
(more)
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)
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..
(more)
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)
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)
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
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
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)
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..
(more)
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)
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, ..
(more)
2014
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)
So my team did not make it through to the next round. They
played a good game against Portugal last night, but it just
wasn’t good enough. Too much ball control, not enough
finishing power. A ton of m..
(more)
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..
(more)
2013
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..
(more)
Enjoying a pipe Most of you probably know that the 4th of July
is only celebrated in the USA and wherever its citizens gather
around the world. Well, being the only citizen in at least a
100-mile radi..
(more)
Playing cards on the Majuli ferry. I’m in Meghalaya at the
moment, enjoying the hospitality of my friends in Jowai. On my
way here I visited friends on Majuli, the largest river island
in the world, w..
(more)
I’ve just been informed by friends who subscribe to World
magazine that an article about my music has appeared in the
most recent print edition! How exciting! I must admit that I
knew it would probabl..
(more)
Anthony “Tony” Guyer was one of the first people I worked with
when starting to play music. Over the years we’ve worked
together on numerous projects and I’ve always valued his ear
and his feedback. H..
(more)
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)