i/o

I happen to be crazed enough to run KDE on my Mactop. Actually, I run it for one application: Kile. Yes, Kile. Though I would prefer to use something like LyX, the main reason I suffer LaTeX is the convenience of having your papers and, maybe even, thesis formatted to specification automatically. LyX doesn’t work on LaTeX files directly, however, so I am paranoid about whether it will format everything exactly the same as LaTeX, and anyway I find LaTeX hacking in LyX a bit clumsy. So at some point I switched to working with LaTeX directly, but the general philosophy of LaTeX editor user interface design seems to be: Let’s stuff as many thousands of little toolbar buttons as we can for all the obscure commands, environments, and, especially mathematical symbols.

Except for Kile. Which still sucks since it doesn’t have WYSIWYG or at least real-time preview, but at least they figured out that dynamic command completion is really frigging useful. So that’s what I use.

But there’s one big problem: I can’t copy from a Mac application to Kile. Or any KDE application for that matter. As the following post discusses

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2007-July/004451.html

you can paste to other X11 applications using the mouse middle button (option-click) (see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html), but it doesn’t work for KDE apps. Unfortunately the post hasn’t been answered, but I finally figured out a not-so-odious work-around: Just run xclipboard.

Yes, old, crusty, xclipboard in all of its Athena widget glory scoops up your native Mac copying activity and magically makes it available to KDE applications with the usual Control-v.

So that’s why today’s UNIX GUI distros still dump hundreds of old and often redundant X applications. Sometimes you actually need them!

The Boobear is napping, so a few moments of rumination are allowed.

I’ve banned myself from working on morphology learning right now, because it’s clearly risky, with a lot of work needed, and that looming January 10th ACL deadline says I need to get cracking on the morphemic MT paper until it’s nearing a finished state. But I feel anxious to spend some time at least thinking about the morphology, so I’ll grant an exception…

(On the other hand, the MT paper looks more hopeful for EMNLP than ACL; the morphology work is more of an ACL flavor, but I’m losing confidence that it will be ready in time.)

As I’ve already noted, the decision to do morphology is fraught with a different kind of peril compared to the quixotic grammar work. While the morphology is much more likely to achieve results in the nearer term, it is also much more likely to achieve similar results for others, and in fact there have been a gazillion papers on this in the past 8-10 years. I need to do more prior-work reading, but it seems probable that even the weakly supervised space is a little crowded already. And the state-of-the-art unsupervised systems are crafted by hardy Finns who live and breathe agglutinative morphology every day, and if my (cheating) system can’t even match that, well, why bother?

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Current processing cycles are being devoted to the following basic question: Should I try to straddle two difficult topics, morphology and syntax, for my impending quals, or go for expediency and stick with one, staying the course on morphology?

Put more cynically, should I cling to that last idealistic drop of PhD motivation in my body, the drive to do something novel and exciting, the last, tenuous hope for a home run that will make the last 9 1/2 innings of drudgery seem worthwhile? Or just accept that those dreams are done and that now all I want is the paper reward, that piece of parchment suitable for framing and the little acronym that says: resistiré.

The Dreamer declaims the following:

1. These ideas are exciting! They are novel, with nice linguistic foundations (albeit unorthodox), and could be a strong development in unsupervised and low-resource grammar learning, and in MT.
2. The high bar for the quals are a bit self-imposed.
   1. The two morphology chapters plus the syntax smoothing (probably feasible for the spring) are sufficient for the quals, so I can still meet that deadline.
   2. With the smoothing completed, the grammar transformations are mostly done.
   3. Then I spend most of the final year on unsupervised learning, with the MT results limited to the most straightforward applications of it.
3. If not syntax, what then? What novel work would you do in morphology to fill out a thesis? Especially since everyone and their cousin has taken a pass at it!

To which The Pragmatist retorts:

1. They are exciting, but extremely speculative and risky. If you’d developed them in year two or even three, that would have been a great time to try something big. But we’re starting year five now, and it’s time to finish, not to finesse.
2. Yes, but then you push more work to do after the quals, and do you really want to be here past May 2009?
   1. A bit hopeful, assuming mountains of SpeechLinks work doesn’t come crashing down, also no chance for a COLING paper, because it’s pretty clear that the current papers will occupy me fully through January 10th.
   2. Yes, but again no small piece of work. 6 months is a safe estimate, so that takes us through the NAACL deadline, without starting on the unsupervised learning, which is harder!
   3. I’d call it 18 months after the quals. Want to stay through December?
3. Ah, you have me there a bit, but I can come up with something. Just watch me….

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