trollcode: linguistics

At School

I am a graduate student in Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin, where my interests (for better or worse) span discourse analysis, stylistics, semantics, sentiment analysis, humor, metaphor, idioms and other multi-word phrases, language generation, and computational approaches to each of these.

I am currently working on a parse selection paper, a domain adaptation paper, and a paper at the intersection of interactive fiction and computational lingusitics, which I hope to submit to two conferences coming up within the months of March and April.

In the past, I've written about multi-word expressions, classifying discourse modes, humor and SDRT, Maori aspect, the phonology of Koiari (a language of Papua New Guinea), the syntactic structures employed in the poems of e.e. cummings, and, lastly, the semantics of multiple senses of the word "last." I have also built a rudimentary CCG grammar of Old Norse and a few pieces of code which have been used by others in my local linguistics social circles.

At Work

I also work as a Lead Scientist for a local software firm, 21st Century Technologies, Inc. where I am the Principal Investigator on two document classification and summarization projects and a dialogue analysis project.

I am currently writing a white paper on using NLP techniques such as sentiment analysis and document classification and link analysis to examine socio-cultural issues in various linguistic communities.

In the past, I've also written proposals on temporal event extraction, cross-document coreference resolution, group and role detection, and bootstrapping knowledge sources using NLP.

At Home

I like to blog and talk about topics related to language and linguistics. In the horribly-under-updated Fear and Loathing in Linguistics, I write tangentially (and as a form of procrastination) about adventures in linguistics graduate school.

That, and I like to drop puns like a dj drops beats. Ask anyone, from my wife, to my role-playing buddies, and they'll tell you straight up that I can't not let 'em fly. It's become a real nuisance, even working its way into poems, which are traditionally expressions of deep feelings. Perhaps I have deep feelings about language, humor, and creativity, and that's why I can't seem to hold 'em in. That's up to you to decide. Or may it's up to me...