winterkoninkje | What I've been up to, pt.II

Other than my research assistantship, I've been taking some cool classes. Larry Moss is teaching a course on category theory for coalgebra (yes, that Larry; I realized last xmas when my copy arrived). While I have a decent background in CT from being an experienced Haskell hacker and looking into things in that direction, it's nice to see it presented in the classroom. Also, we're using Adámek's Joy of Cats which gives a very different presentation than other books I've read (e.g., Pierce) since it's focused on concrete categories from mathematics (topology, group theory, Banach spaces, etc) instead of the CCC focus common in computer science.

Sandra's teaching a course on NLP for understudied and low-resource languages. As you may have discerned from my previous post, agglutinative languages and low-resource languages are the ones I'm particularly interested in. Both because they are understudied and therefore there is much new research to be done, but also because of political reasons (alas, Mike seems to have taken down the original manifesto). We've already read a bunch of great papers, and my term paper will be working on an extension of a book that was published less than a year ago; and I should be done in time to submit it to ACL this year, which would be awesome.

My last class is in historical linguistics. I never got to take one during my undergrad, which is why I signed up for it. Matt offered one my senior year, but I was one of only two people who signed up for it, so it was cancelled. It used to be that people equated linguistics with historical, though that has been outmoded for quite some time. Unfortunately it seems that the field hasn't progressed much since then, however. Oh wells, the class is full of amusing anecdotes about language change, and the prof is very keen to impress upon us the (radically modern) polysynchronic approach to language change, as opposed to taking large diachronic leaps or focusing on historical reconstruction. And I'm rather keen on polysynchrony.