Dr. René Witte has just created a new mailing list (SENLP) to discuss applying NLP techniques to Software Engineering and also to discuss general Software Engineering issues in developing NLP systems. I am interested in both topics. I did 3 years as senior technical support at BEA and could see how applying NLP techniques on written notes in support cases could have improved quality of technical support. I did not get to do any of that, but some interest remains.

I am frustrated. I know my corpus (resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly) shares a lot in common with biomedical and legal domain. And I can find interesting articles in biomedical domain dealing with similar issues of complex tokenization, long named entity mentions (though mine are much longer), etc. But I see nothing in legal domain. I have just gone through all of Jurix’ proceedings as well as all of [Artificial Intelligence and Law][3] and all I got is [between 2 and 4 articles worth following-up][4].

I really do not get Wired Magazine’s subscription policy. They are supposed to target smart geeks, yet make really stupid moves. I used to be a subscriber. But I got annoyed by a large number of ads, deliberate and unnecessary foul language and subscription inserts advertising $8 new subscriptions. So, I did not renew early. Renewal notices starting arriving and that’s where things got weird. The first renewal notice was for $12, not $8 as I was expecting.

It is hard enough to explain what we are doing to our professors; explaining it in plain English to our friends and family is nearly impossible. So it is always good to see people who can explain what POS tagger is and why it is important without having to throw around references to Norvig or Jurafsky. Markus Dickinson has managed to do exactly such explanation in his non-linguistic primer to a serious research paper on Detecting Errors in Part-of-Speech Annotation.

I am visiting my parents and connect to their network via wireless router. My laptop, which is (still!) running Vista kept dropping wireless connection every couple of minutes and reconnecting again. Interestingly, the other computers connected to the same router had no problems. I could not figure out where to even start troubleshooting this issue, until I noticed that the problem only happens while I am running on battery and not when I am connected to the mains.