I’m not sure what happened to June, but it’s all but gone now. It was cold here all the way until about the first day of summer, and now we’re getting all kinds of sun. It’s wonderful. We had a pleasant past two weeks with the house all to ourselves. Everyone was in Italy, and even the dogs were gone, so it was very quiet. The road construction is still going on, so there is very little traffic in our little village, so it was a very peaceful time indeed.
Of course I had school. Elsa is doing very well with potty training and Leah is spending more time keeping herself busy. Katie has completed several personal projects. We have many cute pictures of the girls, but Katie took them so I’m not going to steal her thunder and post them here.
Some of our big items right now are 1. getting visas and 2. finding a place to live. We still haven’t ever been to Nancy, but there’s someone there, provided by the university, to help us with stuff like this. We’ve found several places that we like, and one that would match up very well (online, looking at pictures, sending emails, etc), but we can’t until we get a French bank account and we can’t get a French bank account until….you guessed it….we have an address. In this case, the chicken has to come first. It turns out that there are temporary pay-by-week places we can go to without having to have a bank account, and we use that as our address until we can get an account, then an apartment. We’re not terribly worried because there seems to be quite a bit of available housing.
As for the visas, after a long story of getting an appointment which I won’t bore you with, all of us drove to Frankfurt on Tuesday. We had to arrive at the embassy at 8:45 for our appointment. Well, it was good that we left an hour and thirty minutes early because getting through the morning traffic was nuts and we just made it with a few minutes to spare (and a great parking spot). They only had to see Katie and the girls, so they pretty much sat down while I did the rest of the talking and discussing documents. After some effort getting some money to pay for the visas (99 euros per person, minus myself because I hold a scholarship), we ended up spending about an hour there. Before we left, a Japanese couple happened to walk in whom I chatted with for a little while. On the way home the girls sacked out and we stopped at IKEA in Mannheim for lunch and to look for a big girl bed for Elsa. The former was unsuccessful, but Katie later found an entire set (closet, small dresser, and bed for the same price as just the bed at IKEA).
Meanwhile I’m still in school. I have three HUGE projects. For one of them we’re attempting to model language using suffix arrays. I have a great group and we’ve had some success, but we found out this week that our results aren’t as good compared to the competition as we thought, though we are doing well in some places, and we have a lot we can improve upon. My other project has us working with comparable corpora. In machine translation, the way it’s done is you get a corpus in one language and the translation in another language and put a sentence on each line, then run it through this program which aligns the phrases and words and gives you a phrase table. Well, the problem is some language pairs have sparse data. So, we’re trying to find sentences that are translations of each other by looking on Wikipedea or news sites. The program I’ve been working on has had some good results so far. My third project is in psycholinguistics. We’re attempting to see how Germans process certain sentences with certain constructions. I have two more classes, seminars, but I’ve already given my presentation in both so It’s easy going for me now. I do still have a normal class which takes some time each week, but it sort of takes a back seat compared to my projects. Semantic Theory is interesting, but not quite as fun as the other topics!
So, we’re busy people. But we’re having a great time.