i/o

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….

(more…)

After a long time away, I finally dragged myself back to ISI for an NL seminar. The talk itself, by Slav Petrov, was really interesting, about his work on hierarchically split PCFGs. Basically you can view it as an extension of Klein and Manning’s unlexicalized parsing, except the classes are learned automatically by splitting them repeatedly. For the best performance, many optimizations are needed, such as pruning unnecessary splits (merging them back), smoothing rule probabilities over unsplit classes, and for search a coarse-to-fine strategy is used with a tiered set of models projected back up from the finest-split model. And AFAIK it’s now the best generative model for parsing English. Very cool.

Inevitably, though, haunting ISI again (or the other way around) gets me thinking about the many twists and turns that have taken me where I am, which is spinning my wheels in the mud after four frigging years and doing research that I most logically should be pursuing back there. So all that, in the middle of a major research funk, along with seeing yet another really smart student from Berkeley/Stanford/Penn doing really smart stuff, was plenty to get me downtrodden. But for the final pièce de résistance, I was talking with a certain NL professor whom I had seriously considered working with, and I made a joke about how it would have been a whole lot easier path to doing MT work (mind you, I don’t really consider myself an MT researcher, but it was a joke) if I’d just stayed at ISI. To which he replied, “Yeah, because we’re years ahead of [your lab].”

Ouch. Thanks.

But now, after a few days of recovery, I’m not so worried. In fact, I’ve decided it’s my angle, my brilliant niche. I’m going to do historical NLP! I’m going to do the very best of 2003-style NLP. Or maybe 1999. I can beat anything they did back then. Just watch me go.

Yeah, I’m still here. Four years later. In school. Going nowhere.

But this is the monk-like phase of the PhD program when you sequester yourself and churn out nonsense to show how well educated you are in the art of writing nonsense.

Only I can’t bring myself to write. Anything.

So the blog is back. Maybe I’ll get back in the habit of writing, and the hooey will flow and flow.

I did fancy myself to be a writer once.

Once upon a time…