Keep Pushing (the Boundary)

I was re-organizing my bookmarks the other day, which were just a collection of links that I found interesting… at some point in my life. Some of them can’t even be opened anymore. Anyway, I found this one that is actually quite relevant with my situation now: Matt Might, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Utah, created The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate READ MORE

So… What’s up?

It has been 5 months since the last time I wrote here. What has happened since then? A lot! First and foremost, I’ve finally finished my PhD! 😀 This was probably the main reason why I’d been neglecting my blog for so long. The first three months of this year I was basically in a frenzy of thesis writing, experiments, paper writing and… job hunting. After the thesis was submitted on March 25, the madness READ MORE

Singapore for Summer

I’m in Singapore! And I’m going to be here for the whole summer, 3 months to be exact, for some kind of an internship at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Working on what? Of course… deep learning, baby! 😀 Well, at least… working on an attempt to solve my research problems using deep learning, because it has become the buzzword of today’s NLP research. Yeah, that’s it. I actually arrived 2 weeks ago, but only recently I READ MORE

IndoTimex for Indonesian Temporal Expressions

One question that got me thinking during the interviews with Google was, “Do you have any experience in building an NLP tool, like a tagger or a parser, for Indonesian language?”, and my answer was, “Well, ehem, not yet.”  I wonder why… That’s why, during the last Christmas/New Year break *while waiting for the result of the interviews*, I decided to do something for Indonesian language :”>. Actually, almost the same thing I already did for READ MORE

Of A Very Shiny Crystal Ball Called Google (Part 2)

Zürichsee, from Arboretum, a small park at the very top of the lake Exactly one day after I published this blog post here, a recruiter from Google contacted me, saying that there is an open position fitting my profile: Analytical Linguist, NLU in Machine Intelligence (Thai and Indonesian) Understanding natural language is at the core of Google’s technologies. The Natural Language Understanding (NLU) team in Google Research guides, builds, and innovates methodologies around semantic analysis and representation, syntactic parsing READ MORE

Main NLP/CL 2015 Conference Deadlines

It’s a bit late, I know *I was caught up with some of these deadlines*, but here is the list of deadlines for main Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computational Linguistics (CL) conferences in 2015. I also put the conferences’ important dates in Google Calendar, and make it publicly available at the following URLs: XML: https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/9b442k178hbbnfi9k8fknlvm5o%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic ICAL: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/9b442k178hbbnfi9k8fknlvm5o%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics HTML: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=9b442k178hbbnfi9k8fknlvm5o%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Rome The calendar’s timezone is GMT+01:00, since I’m in Italy. I couldn’t find a way to make the timezone adjustable according READ MORE

Posted in NLP

Of A Very Shiny Crystal Ball Called Google

Imagine this feeling. You have this very shiny crystal ball on your hands, and you can’t wait to put it safely on a shelf, so you can show it off to everyone. However, it’s reaaally heavy, and it took a lot of effort and carefulness to place it safely on the shelf. Just when you think you’re really close, you somehow let it go. You stumbled, or your hands just gave up because it’s too READ MORE

The Story of Tim and Casey

Tim and Casey are best buddies since high school. One day, after years, they meet up in a bar for some drinks, sharing their work life stories, cursing at their bosses ;). They’re working at a company named McRels Inc. It turns out that their jobs are very similar. Both of them are working with text, news to be exact. Tim’s main responsibility is reading news, then ordering every events happening in the news in a timeline, READ MORE

Updates on PhD Life

In order to be consistent with ‘one blogpost per month’ this year *damn, I was more productive back then…*, I will just write some updates on my PhD life, which is going quite well. I’m halfway through my second year now, and I can say.. I’m back on track, after being a bit lost during the first year :). #1 Qualifying exam… passed! PhD Research Proposal – Qualifying Exam from Paramita Mirza I passed the READ MORE

Top NLP/CL Conferences and Journals

I got this tips from the Research Methodology course that I took last year, which is mandatory for first year students in my PhD program: one of the first steps in the PhD study is knowing your community, i.e. the conferences and journals for your field, where people with the same interests gather and share the knowledge and their research. For Natural Language Processing or Computational Linguistics field, Google Scholar computes the ranking of publications (including READ MORE