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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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2026

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)

19 May: The future will be automated

At my son’s birthday party some weeks ago I was talking to a few of the other parents while kids were playing, and, as it does these days, the subject of AI came up. Of the two dads I spoke to, both.. (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 feat.. (more)

10 Mar: Comparative data and localization

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)

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)

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 bu.. (more)

2017

03 Dec: Neural Networks: Some lessons from text classification

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)

18 Aug: Open Science, Data, and Linguistics

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)

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

29 Jul: Deictic Demonstratives (Contd.)

In my last post I discussed the concept of deixis and illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar. Pnar’s deictic demonstrative system combines gender clitics with largely distance-based deictic morp.. (more)

02 Apr: Corpus

For the past week or so I’ve been working on getting my corpus of transcribed and translated texts into shape. The word corpus is from the Latin word meaning “body”, and in this case refers to a “bo.. (more)

2013

05 Mar: This Lamp - a few words about the song

This Lamp by Hiram Ring Sorry for the lack of posting recently - I am on a short (two-month) trip to Australia, and will be continuing to work on my thesis and music and such while I’m here. I only ju.. (more)

10 Feb: Pre-orders for ‘Home’ now available

The new album ‘Home’ is almost here! I’m still working on the artwork with my friend Janina, so it’s not completely done yet, but for now you can pre-order the digital version on Bandcamp: http://hira.. (more)