Recountals of a Computational Linguist

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-26T16:19:00.000-08:00

A few updates from the Bell household...
Eric got a kindle fire. Eric had been saving up the Amazon gift certificates he gets every month from Swagbucks to purchase a kindle. But when the kindle fire came out, all of the prices dropped. Beth was gracious enough to allow him to use some of the "fun" money for the month to purchase a kindle fire. Granted we're not sure we've explored all of the capability, but here's what we know it does well:
1. It plays music from the internet. I didn't realize how handy this was until I started cooking and decorating using the kindle fire as my convenient boombox.
2. Complete internet browser. I can get to any webpage, conduct a quick google query, or look up things like the local weather without heading down to the laptop.
3. Apps- there's a large variety of android apps that run on the kindle fire. While Beth has been enjoying angry birds, Eric has found a few fantasy game apps of his own.
4. Reading- Eric's been reading the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson. The pages flip well, the line spacing, text size, lighting, etc are all easily adjusted, and clicking and holding on any word gives you an immediate dictionary definition. We're hoping that Eric's vocabulary is going to improve.
5. The charge cord and usb cord match the standard kindle, so we only need one set when traveling.
6. Bible- Multiple versions, along with the narration of the bible are easily selected and controlled in a single app. Along with the text are a variety of bible reading plans, making doing something like the one year bible very convenient.
This year for Thanksgiving, Beth and Eric went up to Quincy, WA to visit Beth's grandmother, Mimi.
Eric made carrots and sweet potatoes, Beth made mashed potatoes, Eric made stuffed grape leaves with goat cheese, Eric made fudge, and it all got sampled during our several day visit. We traveled up with Beth's parents on Wednesday. Amy's cousins Steve + Desiree and their kids came up Thanksgiving day as well.
Tom and Amy got Mimi a new TV for her birthday. We hung up Christmas lights, changed out light bulbs, and did a few other tasks around the house. We also went on a few walks to work off the drowsiness incurred from eating too much turkey.
Eric got to talk to his parents and grandparents on Thanksgiving day. Beth got to hear from her sister and brother as well.
We came back on Friday afternoon and by the end of the evening, we had all of our Christmas decorations up. Even though Watson and Basil can't figure out why all of these changes are going on, they've been quite happy to see us back at home.
15 days of work for each of us, and then we've got two and a half weeks of vacation to spend together for Christmas.
We wish all a happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful start to the Christmas season.

Summer Fun

2011-08-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

So what have the Bells been up to lately?
Traveling and teaching.

Here's a few of our recent trips/activities:
April 2-10 Spring Break trip to Seaside / Cannon Beach, Oregon - Beth's parents were able to rent a condo from some family friends. Beth, Eric, Tom, Amy, and Erin all headed out to the beach. The week started with rain and shopping and ended with sunshine and walking on the beach. Each morning we were able to run or walk along the boardwalk into the town of Seaside. We also had the pleasure of drinking coffee at most of the shops in town. We picked up a nice framed photo for our bedroom and some wonderful spices for olive oil dipping sauces at the nearby outlets.

May 10/12 Eric got to experience teaching high schoolers for two days as he co-taught a seminar on computer programming at a conference put on for STEM high schoolers.
May 13-14 Portland, OR- Eric and Beth took a quick trip to Portland to watch Beth's friend Carolyn graduate from college.
May 17-20 Palm Beach, Florida- Eric presented a paper at FLAIRS-23, the Florida AI research society conference. Eric is looking forward to participation in the committee for the applied natural language processing track for the upcoming year's conference. If you want a smaller, familiar conference in the area of intelligent tutoring, AI, or NLP, this is a great conference to attend! The food was wonderful, the sessions were engaging, and there was plenty of time to network with other professionals at the conference.

May 21- Eric and Beth helped out at the local karate tournament put on by their dojo.
May 27-30- La WisWis Campground (near Mt. Rainier, WA) Eric and Beth went camping with their friends Ben and Elizabeth. Our entire small group was supposed to bring their families and camp there for the weekend, but everyone except our two families backed out. We went and had a good time despite the somewhat colder weather. It so happens this is the weekend of the annual Packwood antique/flea market, so we headed over there for a few hours to stare and scratch our heads at some of the junk people will pay good money for.

June 10- Beth finished her last day of her first year of teaching!
June 19-23- Portland, OR Eric and Beth traveled to Portland to attend ACL 2011 (Association for Computational Linguistics) Beth had the pleasure of staying in the hotel while Eric attended the conference each day. We tried several different restaurants in Portland, had fondue in honor of our anniversary, and generally enjoyed our time in the city.
July 15-17- Lake Chelan, WA Beth's family reunion. Eric and Beth went up to Lake Chelan, to enjoy the birthday of Beth's uncle along with the rest of her extended family. We stayed in some wonderful cabins that are accessible only by boat. We got to fish, swim, and talk with family for the weekend.

July 23- Deschutes River, OR Eric and Beth, along with some co-workers, interns, and spouses from Eric's work all went white water rafting, led by none other than Eric's officemate, Andrew Piatt.
August 8-9- Baltimore, MD. Eric traveled to Baltimore for two days and got to visit his parents and brother. Eric enjoyed having lunch with his good friend, John Briguglio.
August 12-14- Cle Elum, WA. Eric and Beth went camping with their friends Ben and Elizabeth again, this time near Cle Elum. We had a six mile hike, a shaded campsite, and lots of smores.

We're almost done traveling for a while. We've got one trip scheduled right before school starts to Effingham, IL. I guess that's the curse and blessing of school. We're home a lot, but we're also not very free to travel since Beth is teaching every day.
We've been playing dungeons and dragons with our friends from karate and work on the weekends
Eric has been running 3 days a week at lunch time with some co-workers. In the summer, we had the pleasure of being joined by Beth's little sister, Erin, who we expect will have a great year as a freshman runner on the Baylor cross country and track teams.
We're planning on co-leading a small group this year at our church along with our good friends Ben and Elizabeth. This has been a constant topic for our camping expeditions.
Beth's attending grad school online, we're still taking karate lessons, and we spend most evenings at home enjoying our two cats.

Springtime: Flowers, sunshine, and thoughts

2011-04-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a few thoughts that I've been assembling over the past few months of reading books, spending some time reflecting, and observing those around me.

Balance + direction:
The person I am at mid-life is not the person that I will be for the rest of my life. - There seems to be an unspoken fear amongst individuals who are developing their careers. I see people defining their existence past mid-life by what they did and who they were at mid-life. This is something that I've decided I don't want to be true of my life.
Work, love, place, and purpose need to be integrated in a way that meets the needs and expectations of each for a person's life. When you've balanced and met your expectations in these areas, work to maintain that balance.

Marriage:
If it is easier to open up with a stranger at a bar than with your spouse, something is deeply wrong with your marriage. - No, haven't been hanging out at bars. But rather, this is reflective of a mentality that I've seen where people tend to talk to others, sometimes even people they don't know very well about their spouse and their marriage relationship. I strongly feel that if the same time was invested in working on their marriages, there would be a lot of happier homes around me. I've witnessed several divorces lately. And in a way that I had previously realized, I see the horrible results and ramifications of breaking the lifelong promise and commitment that establishes and founds a marriage. My marriage and my spouse are a wonderful blessing; I am the man who I am because of my wife and the way that the two of us relate. Our marriage and love deepen as time passes, and as an encouragement for people who are having a harder time with their marriages, and as an example for those students, single people, and married people we come in contact with it is our responsibility and honor to uphold and grow the commitment that Beth and I have. Don't undervalue your marriage and spouse. Your marriage is a reflection of the commitment that Christ has with the church; when you fail to uphold your marriage, you've communicated to others an unfaithful relationship that is supposed to reflect God's faithfulness.
Lots of my friends are getting engaged and married; what an exciting time in life! The "I do" that you say on the day of your marriage is the beginning of a process of finding your life through sacrificing your wants and needs to excel as a couple. An that sacrifice is easy when you consider the life that you will find from a mutual submission and love. When both individuals are willing to make that sacrifice and commitment, your love continues to grow. A love results that is far deeper and more beautiful than the love you feel on your wedding day. Your marriage becomes safety, shelter, accountability, encouragement, and trust. Don't give up during the harder times, your marriage is worth it!

Family:
Family is a high priority in my life. As I reflect back to my childhood, this came partly from my parents and upbringing, but then was reinforced by examples of good families around me. I remember learning a lot about family relationships through the show 7th Heaven, and then thinking much more deeply about the value and meaning of family from the show Everwood. Foster a sense of safety, love, and security for your children.
Check to make sure that the things that you're passionately pursuing in life are the things that matter to you, your spouse, and your family. If you spend your life away from your family trying to provide and bring about a better life, you might just miss the life that's right in front of you. Spend time with your spouse and kids. There are tons of great things to pursue in life, but if you do it at the cost of your life at home with your family, it's not worth it.

People:
The way that we treat others matters. Naively, I believed that when I finally reached the working world there would be no personal conflicts, and the few disagreements that did arise could be resolved peacefully and happily by both parties. That's not the case. Few things matter in life the way that people do. Treat others well. It's no fun when people treat one another poorly.

Grab bag:
I like sports that are lifelong pursuits. Karate + running both have this quality in a way that some other sports do not. I think that's part of where the enjoyment comes from.
Grabbing one word phrases, I like travel, exploring, relaxing, piano, sharing wisdom, outdoors, nature, gardening, family, romance, running, cleaning, organizing, cooking, and children.

Update on us:
Beth and I have been up to quite a few things lately. We've tested for our next belt in karate. We've volunteered some in the local community and at our dojo. We attended a karate seminar in Yakima on a very advanced kata and got to enjoy watching a host of black belts perform martial arts and learned some of the applications for the techniques taught in that kata. We've gotten a new stove + microwave. We've also removed all of the beat up wallpaper in the basement and painted the walls. At work, several papers have been published; now we get to travel and present the work in various places around the world. For Beth, third quarter is finishing up. The yard is getting ready for spring and summer, including producing lots of flowers we didn't even know were planted. We've attended a few plays and have had several different sets of friends over. We're looking forward to the warm weather, the sunshine, and most importantly, the end of the school year!

Kitten Love and Nap Time

2011-01-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

As many of you know by now, there's a new kitten in our home, Basil. Basil was found near a driveway at night in the rain. He's a very soft 7 month old kitten. We were a little afraid at first how the two cats would do getting along, but Basil and Oscar seem to have become good friends - that is when Basil isn't antagonizing Oscar by being young, playful, and energetic when Oscar wants to sleep.
Beth is now over halfway through her first year of full-time teaching, and seems to be doing quite well. She works a lot, (50+ hours a week) but enjoys what she does. We even willingly go watch basketball games and attend plays and things at the high school in our free time. Beth spends most of her evenings reading on her Kindle, an activity becoming increasingly popular thanks to my co-worker Julie who explained that epub files can be converted into Kindle format. The software we've been using is called calibre, and we'd recommend it. Pass it a batch of books, it does the conversion process, and even uploads the books directly onto your kindle if you plug it into the computer.
Eric's work has been busy, mostly revolving around work to meet annual reviews and conference deadlines. We've got 3 papers currently out for review on conferences and just recently found out on will be published in a conference in Palm Beach this summer. Eric hopes to have an intern to mentor this summer. Eric has also been involved in helping document a series of claims for a patent application coming out of some of his work. It's exciting to see things moving forward and progress being made in the research he spends his time on each day.
So outside of long work weeks, what have these Bells been doing? Well, sleeping.

Yes, it's a popular activity for us and the cats.
Sometimes, it even becomes a group activity.

Other than that, we've attended several weddings, visited Maryland and Virginia Beach over the Christmas/New Year holiday and take regular coffee dates to the local coffee shop.
Here's a family photo from the holiday.

Sputters of Thoughts

2010-12-14T20:43:00.001-08:00

List of random thoughts:
Beth and I are horrible at taking pictures of ourselves or our life. We're great at recognizing an occasion as an appropriate time to take a photo, but bringing that to fruition is a rarity.
We tested and passed our karate test to become yellow belts. Tonight we got our yellow belts, but for some reason they're really hard to tie. They actually feel like they're made out of a different material. Maybe that's all part of the fun.
I don't miss school. I finished my thesis 4 months ago and just got my diploma the other day. I read about our friends in grad school or undergraduate school and I can relate and understand their woes, but I'm happy working. In one sense, you can never go back to college, at least, not without the knowledge of the professional working world, but in another sense, it's nice to have a little bit of additional maturity. I enjoy working everyday. And I'm grateful for that. I wonder how many people in life are excited to do their job. 6 months and it's still just as exciting as when I started.
Teaching is hard. How do you motivate students that don't want to learn? And how do you determine if your teaching is effective? How do you become a better teacher?
I've been having random spurts of insomnia lately. I've been trying to go to bed at the same time every night, but seem to be unable to fall asleep some nights. I know coffee plays into it, but even on days when there is no coffee involved, I can lay in bed for hours trying to fall asleep. At least it's provided some good opportunities for professional development. I keep a few texts by my bed that should put any half-rational person to sleep in minutes, but even they don't seem to be working. I need my old prob + stats book back. That sucker worked wonders.

That's all for now.

Winter in Washington

2010-12-01T18:41:00.000-08:00

Unlike last year in Seattle, winter in Richland is the winter that you would expect when you think of living in the Northwest corner of the USA. We've got the snow, we've got the freezing cold rain, the ice, the slippery roads, early releases from work, late starts of school; yes, it's winter!
Here's the latest news from up here. I've been working for 6 months as of today and I love my job. My one fault with work is that I like what I do too much. This means that I work ahead and then get frustrated that I have to take time off. Oh well, at least I've been getting in some good time working around the house and drawing pictures.
I played in a fall soccer league at work and am planning on playing in a winter indoor league with my team lead and some other friends from work. I've been getting a little more involved with work. I get to go once a quarter to directorate zero accident council meetings and submit ideas and collect feedback on how to make our work environment more safe. I've also gotten to travel to Seattle a few times. We've been working on some publications... hopefully we'll be making a few in the next few months.
Beth's been busy with work. The life of a teacher is hard; she works way more than I do. But I think she's very rewarded with her work. She comes home frustrated some nights, but overall seems to think the whole thing an enjoyable experience. It's fun to see her grow as a teacher.
I've decided that we're becoming old people because we've been going to bed at 8:30 and getting up at 5:30 in the morning. I really like this b/c I work from 6:30 to 2:30, and getting off at 2:30 makes for a great afternoon!
Oscar's been working on becoming more social. He enjoys watching us around the house, checking on us in the basement in the evenings, and then playing with his toys when we're not around or he feels lonely. Beth seems overly concerned about Oscar's loneliness. She thinks he needs a kitten playmate. We're still in discussion on that one.
Here are a few blessings of life that I've noted lately:
1. A wonderful coffee machine to make Vanilla Lattes every morning that I'd like one
2. Music to help wake me up and to enjoy during car rides to and from work
3. Computer with internet access and a newspaper so that I can keep track of what's going on in the world
4. Church family and great small group to discuss with and learn from
5. Friends to spend time with and go through life with
6. Amazing office mates to help pass the day and bounce ideas off
7. A joyful marriage with my wife. We're still stuck in the newlywed phase. Just the other night, we ended up sitting up talking for 2 and a half hours when we were supposed to be going to sleep. Not a "discussion," just simply the two of us talking about our lives, our dreams, our hopes.
8. Living close to the in-laws. I married into a great family. I have fun everytime we all spend time together.

That's all for now. Off to fold laundry and watch a show online.

A New Address

2010-09-07T19:07:00.001-07:00

As many of you surely know by now, Beth and I moved from Seattle, WA to Richland, WA on June 1^st. Battelle/PNNL transferred me from a position as an intern in the Seattle office to a full-time research scientist position at the main campus in Richland. Richland, which is Beth’s hometown, is where we hope to be for many years to come. Beth’s family lives about 2 minutes down the road from us, and we can car pool on our 4-5 min drive to work. Beth has taken a full-time position as a math teacher at Hanford High School.

Our house is a government house, specifically an “F” house, built in 1944. We have 3 legal bedrooms, and 1.75 bathrooms. There’s a guest room in the basement as well, but the window is too high to be considered a legal bedroom.

Going on a brief tour of the house would start in the basement, where across from a guest bedroom with a twin bed, there is an office with a built in desk around two walls of the room. The third wall is lined with shelves for storage. The main room in the basement houses our TV (a free donation from the previous owners) and a rocking chair. Off of the main room, there is a laundry room and the ¾ guest bathroom that was recently renovated. Most F-Houses only have one bathroom, so that bathroom is something we really appreciate the past owners having put in.

Going up the stairwell, there is a brief landing by the side door before entering the kitchen. The kitchen has fairly new countertops and decent looking cabinets. Our favorite part of the kitchen- the dishwasher. Yes, that’s right. After one year of washing all of our dishes by hand in the Seattle basement, we’ve graduated to using a dishwasher. As we’ve learned, good soap makes all the difference in getting clean dishes. Leaving the kitchen, you’ll enter an l-shaped living room/ dining room combination. The dining room has a south facing window that gets plenty of light, and both rooms have recently restored original hardwood floors.

Going up the final stairwell, you’ll turn before entering the upstairs hallway. Turn to your left, and you’ll find a full bathroom across from the library/ guest room with a queen bed; and turn to your right, and you’ll find the master bedroom and Oscar’s room. We’ve replaced the broken ceiling fan in the master bedroom, added some shelving in the master bedroom, and filled the library with bookcases.

Our yard is about .2 acres large. There is a small garden and a series of flower beds outback and along the front face of the house. There is also a lamp post out front that works on natural gas – kind of weird. (Oh yeah, the on/off switch doesn’t work, so you have to turn the valve in the gas line) Aside from a few large trees and the ever growing ivy, the yard needs little maintenance outside of mowing. We’re hoping to plant some tulips and hyacinths bulbs for the spring, as well as removing the strawberries and red raspberries that have over taken the garden. There is a shed out back, but it’s in the greatest shape. We’re hoping to attack the ivy that is threatening to overtake the entire roof of the shed soon, and that will improve its appearance.

Trash in Richland is a little different; there is one large trashcan for garbage, one for yard trash, and one for recyclable. Garbage goes weekly, but the other two are picked up once every two weeks. If you want to get rid of more garbage at a more rapid rate, you have to take it to the dump and pay a fee or pay a fee for more trashcans.

Oh yeah, and as Beth has just noted, this is a very old dining room photo. We now have chairs, thanks to the in-laws while we were gone on vacation, and a much larger rug under the table.

That’s all for now, but expect to hear more about our jobs and the surrounding town before too long.

Oscar the Cat

2010-07-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

Hello world! It’s Beth. [On a side note, I learned how to program that in C++ on the first day of class with Dr. Shomper. I learned many valuable things in that class…but most importantly, make friends with the lab aides because they understand and know exactly what you have to do, and will help you greatly.]

Well, it’s been a super long time since we’ve updated our blog, and a crazy amount of things have been happening! One of the more exciting things is that we have a new member of our family! Oscar is a rescue cat that we got from a local rescue agency. He is about 2 years old, and has had a pretty hard life from what we could gather about him. But when we saw him in his cage, crouching in the back, terrified of anyone and everyone, our hearts were touched. We wanted a cat that had a low chance of being adopted by anyone, and Oscar had definitely been there for awhile. So, we met with the adoption lady (ironically named Cat) and took him home to be with us. The poor animal was scared to death in our home! But, day by day, little by little, we drew Oscar out. First, it was out of his little cat tent, into the spare room, affectionately known as “Oscar’s room.” Then, it was out from under our bed. Every day we talked to him, tried to play with him, pet him, and sometimes just sat in the same room as him, letting him acclimate to our presence. Slowly, but surely, Oscar began to be more confident, friendly, and curious. I think his biggest breakthrough moment was when Eric brought home the best cat toy. I call it the fishing rod. It has a black plastic handle, an elastic string, and then a bell and a handful of feathers on the end. Oscar LOVES his toy! He enjoys chasing it around the room, zipping around corners, sliding across the floor, and standing up on his hind legs to try to grab it with both paws. He’ll even play with it all by himself, and chase, bat, and attack his toy. Right now, as I type, Oscar is having a blast, all by himself with Fishing Pole 2. Unfortunately, Oscar tore all the feathers out of fishing pole one, so he got a new one today. But he loves it just as much, even though this one has a mouse on the end of it.

We’ve never had a cat before (at least that we were the sole care-takers of), so we’ve been learning many things about how to properly care for a furry little friend. We’ve learned how to shove pills down his throat (which was an awful 2+ hour experience for everyone involved), trim his over-long claws, brush his coat, feed him, etc. Oscar is a very special cat. Although he is still very shy about other people, he is getting bolder with that too. He loves to purr, and will sometimes spontaneously start purring when we walk into the room (which is sweet). We get much entertainment from watching him play with his toys, or run around the house, chasing bits of fluff. We love it when he snores in his sleep, and when he purringly tries to trip us as we stumble over him. We especially love it when its cuddle time and he demandingly head bangs us in order to spend several minutes loving on Oscar. While it hasn’t been all fun and games (and I have the scratches on my hands, arms, and legs to prove it) we have had such a wonderful experience with Oscar, and are both enamored with him. We are so blessed that he is a part of our family, and I have thanked God many times for having a tiny bundle of fur in the house to talk to, laugh with, cry with, and spend quality time with. We wouldn’t trade Oscar for the world, and in time (maybe…) we hope he’ll be accepting enough to take a kitten into our home.....

Sociolinguistics- From a Post-modern and feminist worldview

2010-06-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I've been wanting to write this post forever. However, I think enough respect to not talk down things that you've been taught in a class is appropriate until you're at least finished with the class.
I took sociolinguistics this past quarter at UW and found myself in a situation of actively disagreeing with the teaching. Here are a few of my thoughts and experiences from that class:
First of all, the apostrophe is not a dead grammatical construct. It is a functional piece of punctuation that serves to differentiate usages and meanings of words. Poor use, no, ungrammatical use of the apostrophe should not be encouraged or reinforced in any age of the population.
Second, with phrases like "couldn't care less" vs "could care less," there is a right and wrong usage. They don't mean the same thing. Could care less is someone who is mistating couldn't care less. The long explanation given at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw&feature=player_embedded only yields support to the claim that there is a difference. Actively encouraging and accepting deviant forms of English is not a good linguistic policy- especially for a linguist!
Also, our ethnicity is principally genetically determined. I can't choose to be African American and then be labeled as African American because I felt like it. That's not a racist thing, it's a post-modern relativism that attempts to break down even clearly distinguishable facts. The post-modernism in sociolinguistics got really annoying. Gender and sex are almost equivalent, and using someone's sex (their male/female) vs. their chosen masculinity vs. femininity is not a poor research choice. It's a practical one, and using such a measure doesn't invalidate the results of your research. There's going to be inherent error, at least you know about this error and we have known values on how often someone chooses their gender to be opposite that of their sex. I had some really rough comments returned from some homosexual students in the class because of that view. It is amazing how upset someone can get just because you have an opinion opposite that of their own. It's also funny how by disagreeing with them you are trespassing on their rights. Is their disagreement with me the same? Apparently not.
The last thing that has been stewing in my mind is where and how to consider ebonics in relationship to English langauge. I do think that ebonics has some validity as a language, but its prestige status shouldn't reach that of standard English.
I felt after finishing the class that my professor undervalued education and grammaticality (interesting position for a PhD linguist) and then that I don't agree with the feminist, postmodern, secular teachings that are currently taught at the public institution. I'm going to be spending some time over the next few years of carefully thinking through the philosophies that I should be portraying as a linguist. I was deeply saddened by some of the things as they were explained to me in class.

Seattle Can't Decide...

2010-04-28T17:26:00.000-07:00

Today's been a weird weather day in Seattle. We went from a cold morning, to a sunny noon, to a rainy afternoon, and now a sunny evening. If people were that fickle... nevermind, we are.
Some exciting news has been happening around here lately. Beth and I are almost finished cataloging the church library, I'm guessing somewhere around 300-400 books remain. You can check it out at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/BethanyBible
Cooking has taken some interesting turns lately around our home. We've had stuffed apple almond chicken breasts, bacon wrapped chicken breasts, scallop stir fry, and beef stew all within the past week.
The excitement is building as I'm down to 5 weeks left of classes, after which an exciting change will probably take place in our lives. (More about that in an upcoming post)
This past Friday, I had the chance to spend the day with other NLP researchers in the Northwest United States and Canada. The conference info is at http://depts.washington.edu/uwcl/nw-nlp-2010/ and if you look through that page, part way down, you'll find a link to the paper that I was able to publish with some of my co-workers. In addition to that paper, we were invited to give a poster presentation, which was a great chance to talk about some of our recent work and get ideas for the future. As some of you know, the project presented in the poster and that paper is the project that spawned the idea for my thesis. By the way, on a random aside, Microsoft employees get free sodas and juice all day long every day- what's up with that?! Thus I have a new mathematical implication too much soda => windows like development.
Eh, all things considered, I actually do know some Microsoft employees on a personal basis and they're not as evil as I would have expected. :)
Yesterday I had the chance to paint my first piece in a long time. It wasn't that great, but it was a fun reflection on the first 10 months of our marriage.
Not much more for now, but expect to hear some exciting news in the next 2 weeks!
I'll try to keep taking photos of food as we cook and maybe even a picture of the artwork I made.

Grammatical Variables as Status Markers

2010-04-06T19:35:00.000-07:00

Have you ever gone out to a store outside of your normal shopping realm and heard some grammatical construction that you find atrocious?
Consider walking into a store and hearing the following:
"I seen the accident" "John come home yesterday" "We ain't interested" or "John seen hisself in the mirror" or a recent favorite "John needs in the building" UGH!
Well, as I'm reading my sociolinguistics book, it's mentioned more and more that these forms that I would consider completely horrid are accepted and regular in some classes of people.
So here's a question for all of you out there, what grammatical constructs do you see that make you cringe, twitch, and shutter in your socks?
As people respond, feel free to let me or others know if any constructs they've identified or I identify seem natural to you.

Lucene Indexing and Stanford POS Tagging Snippets

2010-04-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

At both work and school, the topic of Lucene indexing has been gathering some interest. After a preliminary search on the internet for some good code for quickly indexing documents and their terms, I've found that a lot of internet sites host legacy code for Lucene. This makes it quite difficult to find a good example that will run with the modern version of Lucene.
After piecemailing a few things together, I was able to get the end product I wanted, the code below. However, even this code is using some deprecated methods. It's unclear from the new APIs how to actually go about instantiating and using some of the classes. This is a weakness I've seen in many Java based code projects. There's a wonderful system, great Javadoc comments, and a nice site explaining the capabilities. However, the lack of some basic example code proves to be a sizeable barrier, especially when all you want is something quick to get the job done.
So in case this acutally someday bubbles up to someone who's interested, here's how to index documents in Lucene:
public class LuceneIndexer {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{
//fileDir is the directory that contains the text files to be indexed
File fileDir = new File("H:\\files");

//indexDir is the directory that hosts Lucene's index files
Directory indexDir = new RAMDirectory ();
Analyzer luceneAnalyzer = new StandardAnalyzer();
IndexWriter indexWriter = new IndexWriter(indexDir,luceneAnalyzer,true, IndexWriter.MaxFieldLength.UNLIMITED);
File[] textFiles = fileDir.listFiles();
long startTime = new Date().getTime();

//Add documents to the index
for(int i = 0; i < textFiles.length; i++){
if(textFiles[i].isFile()){
System.out.println("File " + textFiles[i].getCanonicalPath()
+ " is being indexed");
Reader textReader = new FileReader(textFiles[i]);
Document document = new Document();
document.add(new Field("content", textReader));
document.add(new Field("path", textFiles[i].getPath(), Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED));
indexWriter.addDocument(document);
}
}

indexWriter.optimize();
indexWriter.close();
long endTime = new Date().getTime();
System.out.println("It took " + (endTime - startTime) + " milliseconds to create an index for the files in the directory " + fileDir.getPath());
Searcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(indexDir);
search(searcher, "Amazing Cleaning");
}
private static void search(Searcher searcher, String queryString) throws ParseException, IOException {

// Build a Query object
Query query = new QueryParser(Version.LUCENE_29, "content", new StandardAnalyzer()).parse(queryString);

// Search for the query
Hits hits = searcher.search(query);

// Examine the Hits object to see if there were any matches
int hitCount = hits.length();
if (hitCount == 0) {
System.out.println(
"No matches were found for \"" + queryString + "\"");
}
else {
System.out.println("Hits for \"" +
queryString + "\" were found in:");

// Iterate over the Documents in the Hits object
for (int i = 0; i < hitCount; i++) {
Document doc = hits.doc(i);

System.out.println(" " + (i + 1) + ". " + doc.get("path"));
}
}
System.out.println();
}
}

Now, for POS tagging. The Stanford POS tagging is a great free off the shelf POS tagger. It's Java based, easy to download, and there's even example code on how to use it. However, a design choice leads to an interesting question:
In order to make the MaxentTagger, we simply do:
MaxentTagger myTagger= new MaxentTagger("models/left3words-wsj-0-18.tagger");
But then to tag, we have to do:
String taggedString = MaxentTagger.tagTokenizedString(inputLine);
The call is made on the MaxentTagger class, not on our specific instance myTagger.
Any ideas on why they did that?

That's all for now. Hope everyone had an excellent Easter!

Interesting Language Usage

2010-04-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

So the other day, I received my textbook for my sociolinguistics class. We have one textbook concerned with theory and another that is a collection of essays and articles related to the subject.
Today, I was reading one of the essays in the text and upon finishing, turned to the last page of the book. I noticed a sales receipt for the book from Indiana University dated 1/22/02. Here's what's on the receipt:
"No refunds will be made without receipt"- now, it seems to me this would be quite obvious. I need to receive the book, and then I need to hand it back to the salesperson at the bookstore and have him also receive it in order to get the refund. I think it clear that the word "a" was missing, but I hope someone had fun with that one.
Reading on we find...
"No refunds will be given on textbooks..."- is this an appropriate use of "on?" I think not. I would suggest a revision, "No refunds will be given for textbooks.." although even that sounds a bit messy to me.

Finally, the very end says "Defective new books will be replaced at no charge...blah..blah...blah." I'd hate to be the one responsible for printing 300 texts without page 51 or 52. That's gotta get expensive.

Vancouver, BC

2010-03-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend, my wife and I had some free time; she wasn't busy with work, and I was on break from school. So, we headed on up to Vancouver. It's hard to defend never having taken the chance to drive up to Canada when we live so close by.
I have a few recommendations in light of the trip. First off, hotels are overpriced in general, and Vancouver is no exception. However, as some of you may know, we were able to get a very reasonable rate by using Priceline's name your own price feature.
Second, downtown Vancouver is on a peninsula. This makes it possible to walk to almost all of the major attractions from a hotel located in downtown. So if you get the chance, pick a hotel in that area. It's a reasonable area to walk around; provided that the weather is in your favor.
Beth and I spent the majority of our touring time in parks, hiking, looking at gardens, and enjoying the natural beauty of rivers and waterfalls.
Additionally, we have a restuarant recommendation. The Twisted Fork Bistro (www.twistedforkbistro.ca) This isn't the kind of restaurant to take your kids to, rather it's a nice restauarant to settle down in for an evening of wonderful dining with your spouse. The Sunday night special is hands-down the best value on the menu. We arrived at 5:40, to learn that the restaurant opens at 6pm, so we went on a brief walk, and upon returning at 6:10, were able to secure the final table. You've been warned- the restaurant is popular, show up on time. Starting with salads (greens, goldens, raisins, craisins, and apples in a light dressing), and then continuing on for prime rib (seared on the outside, soft in the middle), green beans, mashed potatoes, and yorkshire pudding. Lastly, we were just able to finish off the chocolate cake with ice cream and raspberries on top. If you'd like wine, beer, coffee, or tea, it's all included in the fixed price. The only regret was that we didn't bring our camera or phones to take a photo of the food.
Here's a few photos from the border crossing, our walk around Stanley Park, and our hike in Lynn Canyon Park.

Realizations as of Late

2010-03-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I started work before 6am, and worked all day until Sparks at 6:45 that evening. It's been a long time since I've done that long of a work day, and it's not enjoyable. Going from meeting to meeting to meeting gets really old quickly, and it's hard to focus and be useful at the later meetings in the day.
Sitting in our basement yesterday I realized that my wife works three jobs (all part time), I work a 2 jobs (one full time, one part-time) and I'm a full-time student. Maybe that's why we find that we're both often very busy. But the good news is that we normally have at least one or two days a week where we can spend a solid chunk of our day together. That was yesterday for us.
In the compling world lately, I've finished writing my portion of a paper on improving a statistical-based MaxEnt classifier for marking reason and duration in medical discharge summaries. In addition to that, I also played around with some text generation software in Java, SimpleNLG. If that's an area of interest, you should check out the package. There's morphological analysis, an existing lexicon, and the ability to realize tense.
On another note, I have some news on the food front. Last night, we had cornish hens with a brie cheese dip (see photo), a delightful combination of sweet and sour. Then, this morning, we were able to have cantaloupe and papaya. Another good combination of a soft and hard, sweet and sour.
I've been reading about the process of purchasing homes, which is unduly complicated and seems to involve a lot of people making money who are neither selling nor buying the home. It's actually kind of a bummer, unless you have a lot of money, a bank or lending agency makes a lot of money in the process by giving you the money you need up front, but if you want a home and you're not rich, that pretty much seems to be the thing you must do.
As for recommendations lately, let me mention Trader Joe's real quick. If you've never been, you should take the chance if you ever can check one out. If you happen to live near one, then you're in a great position. They are THE place to go to get artichoke hearts, olive oil, wild rice, marmalade, and bruschetta. In addition to a decent selection of sweet treats (think chocolate covered blueberries, yogurt covered pretzels, and cheap European chocolate), they also have a great deal on fresh flowers. You can normally get a beautiful bouquet that will last upwards of a week for $6 or less.
And lastly, because I have this picture, let me mention that my friend Libby Nelson has one of the best t-shirts I've seen lately. If you know Libby, you know it's also somewhat ironic she had the shirt. Perhaps the shirt is somewhat scandalous, but it's a great way of explaining where the platypus came from. And for those of you who don't know, I have 3 pretty cool looking platypuses as my computer background. I'm a fan.

End of Quarter/ Travel

2010-03-12T18:43:00.000-08:00

Another quarter down. This marks 2/3 of the course work completed. So, naturally, we're celebrating by going to Richland to see Beth's family. Oh yeah, we're also going to Canada soon for a few days. It rained in Richland, which is a true rarity in that part of Washington. Unfortunately, to reach the beautiful, unrainy city, you have to drive through the mountain pass, which meant snow for many miles, tire chains on the big trucks, etc.
Life hasn't been too bad lately. Actually, it's been GREAT! School is going well, work has been enjoyable, and we've been getting to spend time with our church friends and friends from college. Here's a few pictures from our recent visit from Krista + Libby (two of our favorite women from undergraduate studies at Cedarville)

However, the best part of the visit from our friends was getting to have some good heart-to-heart conversations with them. I miss getting to spend time with Krista + Libby, and their visit reminded me how valuable it is to have a few great, close friends. Not the kind of friends that you just enjoy being with, but the type that you can trust with anything. The type of friends that you can go hanging out with and not feel awkward or worry about what others will think. These are the people in life that I'd like to live near and spend my time with. The type that are always welcome to visit or stay, the type that I'd gladly fly across the country to support. The people that I'd be glad to wake up in the middle of the night and talk to, the people that God uses as some of the greatest blessings in your life.

College is a great time- enjoy it while you're there. Not that the working world is bad or annoying or miserable, it's just that never in your life will you be so free. Soon, you'll have a spouse, a job, a house, kids, etc. Invest your time in the things that matter- your relationships with other people.
Sometimes you get to keep your best friend from college, in my case- my wife, but all of the rest of your friends will all move on to jobs and have families and houses of their own before long. There will be fewer and fewer chances to spend time together- cherish every moment that God gives you with them.

Been Sick Lately...Round 2

2010-03-09T20:13:00.000-08:00

Remember when Eric was sick awhile ago? Guess who he gave his sickness to. Yes, his poor, undeserving (of a cold) wife. With my nose running, and my throat grating, I still decided to make dinner tonight. So, I opened the freezer, perused the two grossly overcrowded shelves that we have, and picked out a container of frozen meat. After I spent 20+ minutes of my life defrosting it, I put it in the oven for two hours. I know, what could be a better way to make dinner. But, being the daughter of a dietitian, I know better than to serve simply a main course. After all, meals must be complete, right? So, I looked up in the cookbook to see how you were actually supposed to cook a rib roast (turns out I was right on), and saw that they suggested Yorkshire Pudding as an accomplice. So I figured, since it was fairly straightforward directions, to give it a shot. So, to make a long story short, two hours and 30 minutes later, a rather burnt-looking roast and a rapidly deflating "pudding" were on the table. I say "pudding" because this was nothing like the delicious dessert that we are so used to seeing and eating. It was more of a tasteless pastry sort of dish. However, since tasteless is far better than awful, I think it was a pretty good meal.

In other news: Funny stories of my substituting career.
Every now and then I sub, and find myself in interesting and sometimes hilarious situations. Example: The other day I was subbing for a band teacher, who worked part of the day at a middle school (where I watched the same video of Debussy's La Mer three times. It's actually a beautiful peace of work, you should find it and listen to it if you haven't, because it's spectacular), and the other part at an elementary school. During the elementary school part, I had a 30 minute video for a 40 minute class. Needless to say, that required me and the quick wit I possess to entertain small children (namely kindergartner's) for 10 minutes. Not so hard. So after we had watched a movie on percussion instruments, I had the little ones gather in a circle and we discussed everything of interest in the video. Which took about 2 minutes. So then I started asking the children what other sort of instruments they had been learning about and they said Orchestra, Violin, etc. Then one very cute little boy raised his hand and said, "Jello. We learned about Jello." My mind began searching the universe to figure out what he could be talking about and I had to control my laughter when I found the answer...Cello. He meant a cello.
And that is the end of my story.

Homemade Ice Cream

2010-03-03T21:08:00.000-08:00

3 women, homemade ice cream, beach boys, and dancing... life is wonderful tonight!
The sparks were adorable, our afternoon was great, and now it's party time! Woot!

Been sick lately

2010-03-02T14:37:00.000-08:00

So I've been sick going on a week plus now, but I'm finally getting over it.
We've got two of our best friends from college, Krista Price and Libby Nelson here in Seattle, which has been awesome! I'll put up some photos soon, but we're having so much fun with friends.
Between work, school, and friends, life can be very busy, but it is greatly rewarding. The change of status that I was hoping for at work came through, and lately things have been going wonderfully.
We had a great sermon on marriage and divorce this weekend, and have had several deep conversations with our friends. Oh, how I miss the days of college, all for those one or two great conversations you get to have with someone else each month.
My 51 year old undergraduate advisor got engaged this past week, so that was exciting, and we've been enjoying a variety of different foods, and the sights and sounds of Seattle and Tacoma.
This week and one more week and I'll be 2/3 of the way through the course work for the Master's degree. Final version of the thesis proposal went in, and now the real work begins.

Being crazy busy pays off! :)

Crawling Websites with Large Volumes of Content

2010-02-22T14:36:00.000-08:00

Ok, so here was the problem:
I'm asked to obtain some documents from a particular website. Easy enough. However, after heading over to the website, I learn that the website is mostly a web interface to a database of pdf documents. Fine and dandy. But when I begin to wget on a particular portion of the website, I learn that the content of every article in the database is stored in the same folder. I'm not talking a thousand or so files, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of files, oh, and that's just the jsp pages, no pdfs. (Because I don't need them)
As I progress, I learn that really what I want is that I want to be able to wget only web addresses containing a particular string. Unfortunately, wget doesn't have that functionality inherent. So, I grep the results of spidering with wget and only download the files I want. Great, except, it still takes forever because of the volume of articles. Then, as my program is running.... BANG!!!!
The website totally changes it's structure, renaming all of the jsp files and reworking the entire web interface. How fun is that?!!
So, I go back to square one and take a new approach. Now, I grab all of the table of contents pages that are for the stuff that I want. I do this by opening the html code for an indexing page, cuting, pasting, and parsing a map they have from volume issue num to their own internal numbering scheme. Fine. Whatever, so I write a class to list out all of the pages that I need. (I have to overlist because there is no pattern to determining how many pages of contents a single issue will have but who cares) Run the wget, takes about an hour. Now, take those results, read through each file, and extract from the html the relative links for the files I want, and write those out to a new batch script to run wget to get the files that I was really interested in all along.
Then, run that script, takes 2 hours. Then, do my normal parsing strategy to generate the final xml product desired.
Hopefully this all works. I'm in the middle of the 2nd script running.

Bird Feeding

2010-02-21T16:29:00.000-08:00

So the other day while doing yard work, I happened to stumble upon an old bird feeder in our yard. Our land lady doesn't get outside, or even out of the living room very often, so I got permission to use it. I had to clean it up and cut the old wire that had been used to hang it, but it seemed to work after that.
We hung it on the jungle gym bars and put some bird food in it, and lo and behold, birds started showing up.
Here's what we saw:
In fact, if you know your birds, feel free to name them.

Sunny Day in Seattle

2010-02-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

Today is a sunny day in Seattle- as rare as that is.
After suddenly discovering that several of our new friends have blogs, well, I just have to try it myself.

This is a fun time in life. Beth and I are newly married, we have no kids, we have fairly steady incomes, and we have a good amount of time to spend together. Sometimes, it's funny to think about all of the roles that God gives us in life. Right now, I'm a husband, a student, a computational linguist, a cook-in-training, a house cleaner, an online tutor, an avid reader, a photographer, a bird watcher, an indoor gardener, a Sparks leader, and an occasional runner.
God blesses us each and every day, and for that I am so grateful! Just last night, as Beth and I were falling asleep after a very long night of karaoke and sequence at the Ritter's, I was thinking how privileged we are to have a house with solidly built walls, a roof, and heat. I am sometimes greatly burdened when I recognize the extravagance of wealth we have in America in comparison to the poverty of 3rd world nations.

There are many things to tell you, but just last weekend, I got a book, "2001 Amazing Cleaning Secrets" from Beth's grandmother. If you don't know me well enough to realize this, it was a fabulous present. I read the entire book that evening. But I wanted to share one idea from that book that was most interesting- if you've got a dirty microwave at your house, or even at your work for that matter, take a microwave safe bowl and fill it 2/3 of the way with water, microwave the water for about 5 min while you clean the kitchen. When the microwave finishes, you will find that the steam from the water has coated the entire inside of the microwave, making it very easy to use a paper towel or wash cloth to remove the grime. Try it- it's worth the min that it will take.