i/o

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…