Category: Programming
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)
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)
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)
24 Mar: Git sparse checkout
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, howe.. (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)
16 Feb: A custom handler for faster-whisper on Huggingface
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 .. (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 w.. (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)
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 f.. (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 gettin.. (more)
2023
18 Nov: Website redesign (markdown + pandoc)
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 b.. (more)
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)
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
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)
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
25 Jun: Life vs. Computers
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)