The Gray Area

I have a blog on computational linguistics (www.bakuzen.com) so I mostly keep that kind of thing away from here. But, it’s been my life for the past 6 months now. Now, having taken a few classes in psycholinguistics, speech pattern recognition, syntactic theory, and a general course that covered the broader scope of computational linguistics. I don’t yet, however, consider myself a computational linguist, much less a linguist, though one day I hope to be both.

When I was a teenager I didn’t consider myself “good at computers” even though I knew quite a bit about them. I could never solve problems like my brother could, but then one day I was called upon to solve a new and unique problem. I sat with my mom, who also is good at computers, for about an hour but the final solution was my own. It was clever, I must admit, and it wasn’t invasive to the computer in any way. From then on I considered myself “good at computers.” There may be a day in the future when a similar situation arises and only a true linguist would know the answer, and I would know that answer. Maybe someday.

I took a linguistics class, the only one I ever took at BYU, during my last semester. During that time I started looking at words and sentence structures differently. I remember when we were driving to Vernal, Utah and passed through a very small town that had an advertisement that said “Large Tree Sale!” and I couldn’t help but ask myself if it was the trees that were large or the sale that was large. From then on things were never the same. I suppose everyone in their given profession never looks at their field the same. A musician can’t hear music the same, though at the same time they are more appreciative of good music. The same bodes for artists, physicists, engineers, programmers, writers, farmers, everything.

Katie gets annoyed sometimes, I think, though she usually laughs when I point out sentence ambiguities. When there is spoken dialog, we have the way we think (that is, the way we perceive word meanings and how things could be constructed), there is the way the other person thinks, then we have the way we think the other person thinks and the other person has the way he thinks we think. Somehow in all of that our native language understanding is close enough to actually communicate. This is one of those NP-Complete problems that we’re not trying to solve per se, but at least we’re trying to do our best to find the patterns and generalize. With the amount of ambiguities we naturally throw into our speech, it’s amazing that we communicate at all.

Just for fun with ambiguities, look at these real newspaper headlines (taken from this website) :

Teacher strikes idle kids
Complaints About NBA Referees Growing Ugly
New Housing For Elderly Not Yet Dead
We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container
Dealers will hear car talk at noon

The disgusting thing is, once computational linguists map out the structure of a given language, a computer could come up with literally hundreds of ambiguities in a sentence and give a possible sentence parse for each of them. We have to figure out first, if the correct parse is among those, and second, if the computer decides that to be the best parse. We get very, very into depth in linguistics. We also use a lot of statistics to help us along the way. Some of us delve into psychology, specifically the psychology of language (acquisition, production, comprehension), to see if we can’t model how the human brain is getting the job of communication done and try to mimic that. I have to admit that I love doing this. It is way too interesting and too much fun.

But, at the moment, I appreciate the break. I am able to do some extra work, review some of the things for last semester, and start looking at things for this coming semester. My little family is growing too fast. It’s fun for a wannabe linguist to watch Elsa learn language. I can pinpoint the moments when she produces new language abilities, like using past tense verbs or plurals. Leah’s first two bottom teeth also poked through this past week signaling to me that she is growing up way too fast. She gets cuter by the day. Just look at Katie’s family blog to see the latest. We’re making leaps and bounds in starting Elsa on potty training as she has shown a lot of interest lately (and actually gave it a successful try this past week, sort of on accident). Now, if we could just get winter behind us and bring on some warmer weather, we could do something in the yard….

The current 7-day spread is full of birthdays in our families. Katie’s brother, Erik, turns the long awaited 19 today. Ironically, his pre-mission birthday falls on a Sunday so the celebrations will be low-key. He’s excited to serve as a missionary. He’s studying Spanish and working with the missionaries assigned here several times a week. He’s a good kid and will make a great misssionary.

Katie’s sister, Elizabeth, celebrates a birthday in a few days, as well. She’s expecting her third son and they are in the middle of finding a house. Yikes! Good luck to them!

So, happy birthdays to everyone. But today’s post is more about my dad. His birthday was this past week, on Wednesday. I didn’t do much for him on the day other than call, so I’m going to say a few words.I did eat some German yogurt in his honor on his birthday and the day after Erik and I took to the yard to take care of a mole problem, which could also easily be in his honor as moles are in some ways akin to gophers, his most hated loathed vermin.

I’m not going to say that my dad is “cool” because he doesn’t care to be cool and I wouldn’t care that he is either. In fact, growing up, he was thought of as the “mean” uncle by some of my cousins because he didn’t let kids mess around and do stupid things. He holds you to your word. Hard worker? He typically sets the pace, even now that he is 61. He expected a lot of us when we were kids (certainly compared to what I see parents expect of their kids these days) and it served us well. I look up to him in many ways. I didn’t end up as a farmer as he, or a business owner as he (yet) but one thing I can say is that I followed his example in finding and doing something that I love to do. He’s a leader. When he teaches, he doesn’t put on a show because his lessons aren’t about him. I saw a quote once that I have to agree with: The only thing better than having him for my dad is to have him as my children’s grandfather. Katie recognizes the kind of man that he is and looks up to him, as well.

And a picture of Elsa assuming a position I can only imagine she either saw or inherited from the paterfamilias:

Finally, finals are done. I finished my last one on Wednesday. It was by far the most difficult one, even though I technically had the most time to study for it. I was blessed to be a part of a study group last Monday who were all linguists and knew the content very well. Our grades were posted the next day (to our surprise) and I found out that I didn’t do too bad at all. I spent a few minutes with my fellow students after the exam, said my goodbyes, found lunch, and came home. Summer semester starts on April 12th, so until then I will be putting in more hours for the MTC and DFKI.

What a semester it was! I am loving this. It was long, hard, and some days I was gone from 6:00am until 8:00pm, but with Katie’s support and patience, we made it through. It was designed to be my hardest semester of the program. It’s downhill from here in many ways.

Leah is working her hands quite well and nearly sitting up on her own. I attached a picture for your enjoyment. She’s getting to be a much better baby in many ways. Because I don’t have to get up early early every morning, we finally started letting her cry herself to sleep and she’s doing well. In fact, the girls slept in the same room last night and did quite well despite being sick.

What’s more, is Katie got a haircut. She had been talking about chopping off her hair to her chin. I was against anything shorter than shoulder, but she pulled it off. She looks quite lovely, if I say so myself.

I feel myself getting the late Sunday nervousness that I usually get in anticipation to Monday, the start of another school week. Hopefully after a few weeks that will wear off. Oh well. Enjoy the pictures, anyway.

Everything seemed to happen this past week. I only have one final, but I was really nervous about it. It was one of those classes where we had a different instructor come in every two weeks and give us a broad overview of a certain topic or field. So, one would think that an exam with just a bunch of broad stuff would be easy, but don’t be so sure. Well, on Monday I went to a fellow student’s apartment and a group of us studied like we had never studied before. It went well, but I didn’t get home until about 9:00. The next day was also study all day, and the following morning up until the exam. The exam was very long, but we only had two hours to git r done. After I went through and read all the questions before beginning, I was much relieved. I could answer each question without too much trouble. It went well, I think, and it seemed to be a good exam for most people. The proctor was even nice enough to allow us an extra 30 minutes, which some people took. But that meant the part would have to start later….

Yes, Katie and I decided to host a party. This would be a party for my university friends. The plan was to have them come on the train, chill and eat food for a few hours, and head back whenever they wanted to. I found some cheap train tickets that would allow round-trip travel for less than 3 Euros. Now, would anyone come? After all, I hadn’t really gone to any of their parties. There would not be alcohol at my party. It would be right after an exam, when people might be too tired. I expected maybe 5 to 8 people. But, after announcing the party and by the time people go on the train, there were 22 of us, and one person missed the train by a mere minute.Well, the party went well I supposed. Mostly people just sat around and chatted, ate food, some played Wii, and we gave tours of our house. It was sunny for part of the trip, but then it turned cold and snowy, but we all seemed to have a good time. Everyone was only here for 3 hours. I imagine that more partying went on after they made it back to their apartments.

Here are some photos that one of my friends took:

That day Katie’s mom had a little party of her own with a book group. The main event, however, was neither of the parties. Erik’s mission call came in the middle of everything. We stole away from our party that afternoon and locked ourselves in the office, with grandparents on the phone and siblings on the webcam. Erik opened his call and….Portland, Oregon Spanish speaking. He seemed a little shocked, but liked the idea of speaking Spanish. Of course, when one thinks about it, it will be perfect for him. I called my own parents that night to share the news and it turned out that my dad guessed right.

I spent the next day doing work for DFKI and then had a meeting. We’re working on a machine translation system that can handle multiple languages at once. So far things are going well, but we have much to go. That evening was interesting. I left the meeting to catch my bus, but realized that the bus I usually take no longer runs. It only runs during the semester, so I would miss my train and get home an hour later than I thought. Another bus came that was headed to the Saarbrücken central station. Of course, it would get there late but I thought perhaps if the train was 10 minutes late that day, I could make it…. and it turned out that the train was 10 minutes late. I couldn’t help but give some silent thanks as I ran to the platform. My connecting train was late, too, so I made it home without missing anything.

The next day Katie surprised me with a night away from everything, kids, studying, work, and everything. I did have to go to campus for a bit that morning for a review session for my last final this week, but I was back by 1:30 and we left an hour later to Ramstein to a nice little hotel. We went on a walk, ate a progressive dinner, and had a very pleasant evening away form it all. It was the first time we were able to spend a night alone for over a year. Thanks to Katie’s mom and to Anne for watching the girls!

When we got home it was back to studying. I have one final left this Wednesday and I’ll need every second to prepare for it. It will easily be my most difficult exam. But, after studying yesterday, I feel much better about everything.

I want to take a second on this Valentine’s Day to say thank you to Katie. She has been so supportive during this semester, it is unbelievable. She takes care of the girls, gets up in the middle of the night when they cry, she makes sure everyone is clean and happily fed. Once in a while, she thinks about herself, but not very often. Hopefully this Valentine’s Day I can let her know how much I love and appreciate her.

This past week was probably one of my hardest weeks this semester. It really began with not going to church last Sunday because of weather. It was ironic because we had a beautiful, sunny day. But, after 7 phone calls from other ward members, we gathered that things in Kaiserslautern were not good, so we stayed home. I always enjoy going to church and getting oriented for the week. We took a walk, Katie got a nap, and made it a lazy day, perhaps a bit too lazy. But, we did have a little meeting of our own here later that day and that was quite nice.

Then came the beginning of the school week. I was looking forward to it in that it was our last week of classes, but there was more to it. Some of our professors decided to hold exams this past week, as well. I took the exam for my Computational Psycholinguistics class on Wednesday. I had started preparing for that several weeks in advance, so I wasn’t particularly worried about it. We had 100 minutes to finish a number of questions and everyone in the class used every minute they could. I was happy to answer every question. Then I only had two days to study for the Patterns of Speech Recognition exam. I had gone over all of the lecture slides the week before, but that didn’t seem to be enough. Luckily, one of my fellow classmates posted a list of the possible test questions she could think of. They spanned two printed pages with .10 size font. After going through those slides all day Thursday (and skipping the only class I skipped last week), I felt much more ready. For this exam we had two hours and I was able to answer all the questions that I needed to in about an hour, then I spent the rest of the time making sure I did things right. It included some math, statistics, and lots of words to describe different approaches to pattern recognition. We had to answer 10 out of 15 questions and I felt pretty confident with the 10 that I answered.

Let’s not forget the weather this past week was the worst this winter. We had a winter storm that dumped enough snow to shut down the entire Saarland bus system. It required me to have to walk to the train station from campus one day, a 30-minute walk, but luckily my class got out early that day so I made it home on time. We about a foot of snow by Tuesday, but you couldn’t tell now. Things warmed up and we had several days of rain.

It’s not over yet, however. Not having a car to drive freely to campus when I needed it made matters more difficult, however manageable. Therefore on Friday I took the train to Kusel, walked to the area office, and found that it was closed. I went there so I could ask them about extending our licenses, etc, but that didn’t work out, so I wasted some time. Then, yesterday Katie and I got a real German cultural experience: we went to a first aid class. In Germany, one is required to have a certificate in first aid in order to get a driver’s license. It started early in the morning and went for 6 hours. There were 16 of us in there and I caught about 60% of what the instructor was telling us (all in German). We had fun practicing rolling people onto blankets, CPR, applying bandages, and pulling off motorcycle helmets. I would have liked to be studying for my next exam yesterday, but we need to get our licenses sooner than later. It was fun at times, went by quickly for the most part, but it was all stuff that we already knew. Oh well, a nice reminder. Katie thought the best part was that they had a CD with a nice beat to which we did CPR.

This next week won’t be as bad. I have one exam on Wednesday, but I still have a lot to study. Then my last exam is a week after that, so I have plenty of time to get ready. Good thing because it will be my most difficult class. After that I have on big paper to write, but I’m not terribly worried about it.

Therefore I say this past week that I felt… “stretched, but not overwhelmed.” Things are looking up now, but there is always plenty to do. At BYU I often had 4 or 5 tests in one week, and that was stretching, but they weren’t usually masters level courses.

Leah had a good week this past week. She found her hands and can better grab things. She is sleeping through the night better, with some rough nights, but she usually just wants her binky. She loves to spend time in her little roller chair and look in the mirror. Elsa is very sweet to her (most of the time) but she does ask mommy: “don’t kiss Leah, kiss me!”

That’s it. A simple update. Thank goodness for Sundays.