Kelly at UW Computational Linguistics at University of Washington

Finished Autumn Quarter 2010

Waveform of Kirundi in Sound Forge. I spent lots of hours listening to this and transcribing the language into the International Phonetic Alphabet...

So I have officially wrapped up my first quarter of grad school.  It was not easy, but I am very happy about what I have learned and what I have accomplished so far.  This quarter was a mix of several different classes.  Each presented its own unique challenges that helped me to grow.

Ling 566 (Introduction to Syntax for Computational Linguistics) is probably the course that stretched me most.  It was exciting to perform a complex model of syntax that not only can be implemented on a computer but is also highly aligned with research in psycholinguistics.  The textbook was excellent and it was very rewarding to continually build up from a simple grammar into a complex one which is capable of modeling language variation and phenomenon such as Long Distance Dependencies.  This was very difficult for me, so I am glad I put extra time into this course.

Ling 570 (Shallow Processing Techniques for NLP) was less of a challenge for me personally but the material was rewarding as we were able to build systems to perform Part-of-speech tagging, morphotactic expansion, document classification and several others.  I look forward to the continuation of this series with 571 and 572 this Winter.

Ling 550 (Introduction to Linguistics Phonetics) was a treat.  Since my background is in Computer Science, it was a thrill to take an actual graduate Linguistics course.  I can't believe how much material we covered over a 10 week course and how much I know am aware how we generate and hear sounds to communicate with one another.  Of course since I love to learn languages it was great to learn more formally about how certain sounds are made since before I would simply imitate what I heard from others but now that I am more aware of the articulatory processes involved in making sounds, I am much more careful in speaking French and Spanish and I am much better equipped to learn other languages I would like to study like Portugese and Arabic.  I learned how about the different sounds of the world's languages including clicks and implosives and often found myself practicing them while walking around Salt Lake which made me look crazier than I am.  The real reward in this class was using all the skills to perform research and make a real recording of a language I didn't know just as a field linguist would.  I chose Kirundi since I have taught English to several refugees from Burundi.  My final paper and recording turned out much better that I could have hoped and now I intend to share my work.

I am considering sharing my paper with the Journal of the International Phonetic Association since much of what I found about the language I had to translate from French sources.

In addition, I plan to augment the current page for Kirundi on Wikipedia with the research I found and include the sources which were helpful to me in studying the language.  Check the page now and check it in a week and hopefully I will have added quite a bit to the page.

I have also shared the .PDF of the final paper and the audio files of the recording over at this new Kirundi page.

All in all, this was a great quarter and I am looking forward to starting up again next week and I will be in Seattle to start the first week of classes.