Linguistics

With the iPhone, iPad, and similar devices, we are seeing a transition into a new paradigm of touch screen interfaces, wherein the physical interface becomes virtual, able to dynamically adapt as needed to fit any context. Imagine what that could do for a classically difficult problem of Linguistics: typing IPA

A wise man once said, that if you train an n-gram model with too much data, it will hurt. Bad. We’re talking Kurzweilian singularity ➡ grey goo ➡ ??? ➡ profit! kind of hurt. That’s the way I’ve felt over the last month or so, thinking about my thesis; there were so many directions I could go in, so many theoretically intriguing and clever avenues to venture.

That the creative processes of all writers—poets, novelists, academics, and the like—are completely hidden, is what makes NLP so frustrating. Such underdetermination is the reason why XKCD can (justifiably) dish beeves upon computational linguists with such pizazz. There’s just no way to know what the hell is going on underneath the hood with human language, and all we have to go on is what comes out on the other side.

In order to complete my BA Linguistics, I have to write a Thesis. My goal for this project is to develop a programmatic module that, given a subject — be it love, Paris, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—can produce a valid (and ideally tear-jerking or awe-inspiring) poem in the forms of Haiku, Limerick, and Fib.