You can argue that the next generation (my parents) are already used to computers, so we can stop worrying about this problem. But every day, there are new devices replacing existing ones. We need to make it easier for anyone not familiar with such devices or interaction mechanisms to learn how to use them.

It would be great if we can come up with interfaces that are so intuitive, or that mimic human-human interaction so closely, that there is no “learning” required to be able to use them.

Or, maybe all that is needed is an enthusiastic student and a good teacher. My grandma has learned from my mother how to type and use Google Indic transliteration to type in Kannada in one day. She is now sending me chats in Kannada (which I cannot read) on Google chat

It is expensive ($100). The reviews seem to be really good. I am a poor grad student. But this is a book I’d love to own, and an ebook will just not do. Hmm, maybe a New Year present to myself.

• The unique 2nd person plural pronoun “yinz”
• The “au” sound being pronouned as “ah”, so that “house” comes out as “haas” and “Downtown” as “Dahntahn”.
• “Full” and “fool” being pronounced the same, as well as “pull” and “pool”.
• “Needs”, “wants”, and “could use” combining with a participle rather than a gerund, as in “The car needs washed” or “There’s work that needs done”. (Pittsburghers think the gerund in “The car needs washing” or “Work needs doing” sounds very strange.)
• Positive anymore: “Food is so expensive anymore!”

On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

Straw men and Bee Science

Enjoy

Going to India in 10 days, very excited I have missed home way way too much.

This year has been good and bad. I haven’t done as well as I would have liked to, but there have been positives and I have learned a lot.

Something funny – the very first NLP related talk I ever attended was a tutorial on XLE (a grammar development platform) in Hyderabad at the ICON 2007 conference. Now, I’m doing a course project using XLE, to write a Hindi grammar

I plan to get some serious research done over the summer once I get back from my trip, and will hopefully update this blog more often.

I plan to take Language and Statistics and Speech 2: Phonetics, Prosody, Perception and Synthesis. Looking forward to both courses.

Meanwhile, I was Googling around and found something interesting

The AI Genealogy Project

I am advised by

Jack Mostow, PhD, CMU, 1981 – Mechanical Transformation of Task Heuristics into Operational Procedures

Advised by Jaime Carbonell, PhD, Yale, 1979 – Subjective Understanding: Computer Models of Belief Systems

Advised by Roger Carl Schank, PhD, U. Texas Austin, 1969 – A Conceptual-Dependency Representation for a Computer-Oriented Semantics

Advised by Jacob Mey, PhD, 1960, Københavns Universitet, Denmark

Advised by Louis Hjelmslev, MA, 1923 (big gap here!), Københavns Universitet

Advised by Holger Pedersen, PhD, 1897, Københavns Universitet – Aspiration in Irish

And Wikipedia on Holger Pedersen says

Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages.

Really nice to know

This is something that interests me a lot (bridging the gap between research and technology) and I hope to see a lot more spin-offs from CMU over the next few years that I’m here. I also hope to see something that doesn’t involve crowd-sourcing or social networking (though I know that is in fashion these days )

More posts soon!