neat! a new version of pydev (a python IDE plugin for Eclipse) is out. Among other fixes are good $PYTHONPATH handling and a more robust debugger. My day just got so much brighter =).
Category Archives: computer science
pydev 0.9.4
09-Jun-05Saturday morning I had a great idea. I realized my work in modeling second language learner phonology errors was really an approximation of a finite state transducer framework. And the bugs and speed issues I had been dealing with for much of the last 3 months were not on the linguistics side but more on […]
Spam in the Post-Turing-Test World
22-May-05The recent combination of getting a lot of pseudo-conversational-type email spam, and getting to know an online friend whom I’ve never met in real life has triggered an interesting thought: When (if) we solve the AI-hard thing, when we’re able to make virtual agents that can carry on conversations and social interactions just like real […]
On Things Folksonomic
04-May-05Stefano’s Linotype has a good essay on emergent folksonomy, especially how it applies to del.icio.us and the different-people-use-the-same-word-to-mean-different-things problem. His solution to colliding semantics is to augment syntax to document things. This is good, but it overlooks the fact that I myself might use the same tag to refer to different things.
As of last night I finished up a submission to Eurospeech 2005 with Abhinav Sethy. I’ve posted it here: Modeling and Automating Detection of Errors in Arabic Language Learner Speech. In a nutshell: Understanding bad-accent/bad-grammar learner speech is hard for humans. And what’s hard for humans is even harder for machines. Compound a relative lack […]
A Caveat About the Brain
22-Mar-05One caveat off of last post, comparing the brain to a Turing Machine: Perhaps I should be more careful about making such comparisons. Throughout history, mankind seems to have always used the latest tech to talk about the brain. The ancient romans said the brain was like a catapult. Later, people have compared the brain […]
Last week marked the end of my Second Language Acquisition class with Dr. John Schumann over at UCLA. The class was amazingly good. Dr. Schumann is an old-school applied linguist who, halfway through his career, decided that studying applied linguistics from a cognitive psychology background was futile without more practical grounding in how the brain […]