Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer - interview with the authors

These days we are the eyewitnesses of the data boom. More and more linguists turn to statistical and probabilistic methods and start using the quasi-standard tools of data analysis like R, Python and databases (SQL and those noSQL stuffs). It wasn’t easier to get into natural language processing, the nltk toolkit and the book is freely available and there are other great books on the market that teach you the basics and more advanced techniques. Although this huge success, more and more nlp company choose a functional programming language as a tool of development and the Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer book (which is presenting the basic ideas of nlp in Haskell, and it is in draft version) got a lot of attention in the community. We interviewed the authors of the book; Daniël de Kok and Harm Brouwer.

On NLTK and Python - an interview with Jacob Perkins

Getting into natural language processing has never been easier these days thanks to the popular natural language toolkit (nltk). Python, nltk and even the book that teaches you nlp are free! Although nltk was designed by its creators with pedagogical considerations, Jacob Perkins (@japerk) showed with his nltk demos that it can serve as a serious API. His blog http://streamhacker.com has become a standard source of tips and hacks for nltk users, and his "Python Text Procesing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook" is the natural choice for everyone who wants to be a pro nlp guy.

ESSLLI 2011: Why you should go to Ljubljana this year

Dan Lassiter, the chair of the 2011 ESSLLI Student Session, invites you to attend the 23rd European Summer School in Logic Language and Information

ESSLLI is a two-week summer school in logic, language, and computation held every year in a different location in Europe. This summer it's in beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia. This will be my third ESSLLI in three years, and every year has been great, both educational and a lot of fun. You choose from a wide variety of courses in these areas: five per day, 1 and a half hours each, for one week, and then a new set of courses the second week. You're also allowed to move between courses if you like, so you aren't tied into any particular course when you register. You can find more info about ESSLLI and registration information here: http://esslli2011.ijs.si/.

The Life of a Computational Linguist VI - Interview with Jeremy Kahn (Director of Research, Wordnik)

Are you keen on words? You'll love Wordnik "the place for all the words, and everything known about them". Jeremy Kahn the director of research at Wordnik was so kind and answered our questions. Jeremy got his AB in Linguistics from Brown University and recently defended his PhD thesis at the University of Washington. He is a very active member of the linguistics community on Twitter, where you can find him as @trochee.

The Life of a Computational Linguits V - Interview with Vincenzo Pallotta

After a long hiatus we continue our series. We interviewed Vincenzo Pallotta who is a research professor at the Webster University, Geneva, a core group member at ThinkServices, and co-founder and CTO at InterAnalytics. Vincenzo is a unique mix of strong scholarly interest and a vein for business with a broad interest spanning from theoretical computer science to human computer interaction and computational linguistics.

The life of a computational linguist IV - interview with Alyona Medelyan

This week we interviewed Alyona Medelyan who's a Senior Software Engineer & Researcher at the NZ enterprise search company Pingar where she's working in the areas of semantic and faceted search, query analysis and search result representation. She's got a nice research blog, the Topic indexing blog, and you can find her on twitter as @zelandiya

The life of a computational linguist III. - Interview with Hugo Liu taste researcher

This interview is a little digression from our series, The life of a computational linguist. We talked with Hugo Liu who's the Chief Scientist at Hunch.com and a research affiliate of the MIT Media Laboratory and MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, where he has taught courses on artificial intelligence, and philosophy of aesthetics. He's got a blog at larifari.org and you can find him on twitter as @dochugo

The life of a computational linguist II. - Interview with Oliver Mason

This week we interviewed Oliver Mason, a computational linguist at the Department of English of University of Birmingham. He holds an MA in Computational Linguistics from the University of Trier, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. You can find more information on Oliver on his personal webpage. He runs two blogs, Language and Computation and Learning, Teaching, Research. You can find him on twitter as ojmason.