errands and GenI hacking

Polished off all my errands this morning (yay, will have health insurance for the next two months!). Spent this afternoon implementing partial results. Spent the evening chatting with P. Spent the night debugging partial results (lots of stupid infinite loops because eric is stupid). It kinda sucks, prints out
* foo bar
* quux
* ping pong

where 'foo bar', 'quux' and 'ping pong' are all partial results for a single semantics. Why this sucks is that from a UI standpoint, it is horribly inconsistent with how I return full results (one line per paraphrase).

Oh well. I guess that's what you get for last minute coding.

And tomorrow begins my first real holiday in a while. Uhm. This whole... holiday... thing. I actually have no idea how to do it. I normally bring lots of work, and then make myself totally miserable by (a) feeling like I have to do it and (b) not doing it. This time... nothing. Maybe do some coding for fun, but M tells me « il faut décrocher »

See you in October!

mutuelle

Looking for short-term complementary health insurance, a mutuelle for 2 months. Wrong blog? Not really... just the first time that a hypothetical NLP application didn't feel horribly contrived
to me.

argh, 2/3 done

Cooked up a GenI demo for Y (and the open house)... did it on C's Mac because I didn't want to think about what it would take to make GenI work on GHC 6.4.

Plugged in 2/3 of the requested changes to the supposed journal article. Argh... would have liked to have it polished off, but no idea what was expected of me.

errand day

Spent today unpiling a whole bunch of shit that I had been putting off until the end of the rédaction: lettres de résilation, insurance crap, etc. Stress level dropping a bit because I took care of quite a bit of stuff. Still some open loops, but much more manageable-looking.

Got to work in the afternoon, took care of some more actions (congés, rapport d'avancement de thèse), tidied up desk. Working on the journal article now, playing a very minor role, just filling in numbers here and there. Porting some of the tricks I learned like \footnote. Tomorrow, might work a little bit on GenI.

kowthese-1.0

Guess I'll be cross-posting this on all my blogs: kowthese-1.0 (pdf.zip)

Note that this is version 1.0, which means it is the version that went out to my PhD committee, but it is not the definitive version. Version 1.1 or 1.2 will include the committee's comments/corrections as well as any other bugs you may find.

Today was pretty hectic, what with printers going crazy and all. See how I said it would be like? No joy, no relief, just..."well now what?" (here's what: everything I've been putting off until the thesis is done.

almost there...

Finished up the JLR changes I was willing to make. I hope I did it right. Gave back my changes for round #2 (that's very generous of him, merci). Wrote up the inference rules with unification. Finally sat down and ran my thesis through a spell-checker, which I normally hate doing. I'm now up to version 0.7, which I won't release because I'm lazy.

Version 1.0 should be coming out tomorrow or today.

more JLR

In the middle of reading JLR's polarity filtering chapter. Nice and concise. I'm jealous :-). Added some more JLR comments to the polarity filtering chapter last night and this afternoon. Have a somewhat superficial discussion of his work, although I don't have the idea for all of it yet. Should be done with this by tomorrow... I hope?

thanks to the brigade!

This morning, some members of the brigade gave me their comments for ch2, ch3 and ch7 (oops, it was ch2 that I had assigned, not ch4). SH volunteered to join the brigade, so I gave him ch4 to read. Might give ch5 to a friend, but it's not ready to go yet.

I am somewhat tempted to fix the definition of n-key polarity automaton, simplify it. But I am also afraid of introducing some new errors in the process. Dunno. The old way is actually rather complicated and heavy, and as JLR points out, unnecessarily so. But every change I make at this point is potentially dangerous. There are a quite a few 'you should do X' bits of advice which I am going to ignore simply because we're too close to 1.0. So why am I working on this one? Two things I need to work on is point the complexity discussion somewhere else instead of using my own (JLR gave me links for that), and mention some other JLR work and related issues. This is basically the bulk of changes I will need to declare 1.0.

Still waiting on P and C comments, as well ch6 from MB.

au service scolarité she goes

Well, there you have it. GB of the service scolarité has 2 copies of my thesis (version 0.5), an avis argumenté from C (good thing we noticed this last night! she's now in Paris) in triplicate, my proposition de jury (also in triplicate) and a list of my publications. But no sense of achievement, accomplishment, nothing, always mopping up, always cleaning, tweaking.

I'm doing version 1.0 next week. Got some comments from JLR on the polarity chapter. Great reader! Spotted lots of bugs in the explanation, emphasis on the wrong stuff. Gave me a way to simplify my n-key polarity (which I might push to version 1.1 for fear of rocking the boat). Also ideas on links I could make with his stuff, which I need to print out.

Tired, but that's my fault. Stayed up till midnight printing everything out and putting it together. Would have been all set if the document binder wasn't broken. Then stayed up till 3 watching TV on YouTube. Discipline breakdown? Or maybe loss of context for discipline? Can't afford to be tired yet. Lots of crap, just random crap to take care of. Must go to bed and stuff, stick to routine. Worship the routine.

missing bits

Actually, in theory, I can send out my thesis already, no need to wait for the stupid service scolarité green light (why didn't they just say so?). Anyway, still not ready, need the following bits before I can push to 1.0

• Appendix B - deductive kay/geni with unification
• ch5 - links to JLR work
• ch5 - other JLR comments (e.g. n-key simplification?)
• ch5 - complexity in building polarity automata
• acknowledgments - maybe wait for version 1.1
  

Waiting for:

• ch1 - v0.3 comments from P
• ch3/4 - v0.4 comments from proofreading brigade
• ch6 - brigade
• ch7/intro/conclusion - brigade
• final comments - C

strip eject jam

Learned this from DR of thloria fame + some safety tips from me: shut document binder down... wait a long-ass time for it to cool down (possibly overnight), turn it back on, push the back plate (on which your document normally rests) back. This should reveal the document binder innards, notably the jammed strip. Use a pair of scissors or something to gently and delicately pull the strip out. Try not to electrocute yourself (I don't think there are any exposed bits, but who knows). Alternatively, you could just go down to Vélodrome and ask the local repographie place to bind it for you, but then you don't get the fun of pointless, potential self-injury.

French LaTeX

Definitely not the last word on this, and it has been said before. But now I know why they say it :-)

% get hyphenation right (match the encoding of the hyphenation rules)
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

% (goes with [T1]{fontenc} above) get less ugly pdfs on screen
\usepackage{ae}

% guillmets (goes with ae package above)
\usepackage[cyr]{aeguill}

% typesetting conventions
\usepackage[frenchb,english]{babel}

i.e. and e.g.

From Some common mistakes to avoid in scientific writing:

A small but frequent mistake among beginning authors concerns abbreviations. If one writes e.g.:

John ate some piece of fruit, viz. an apple, i.e. he devoured it.

Latex will think that one sentence ends after ''viz.'' and a second after ''i.e.'' and additional inter-word spacing is added. To prevent this, insert ''\'' followed by white-space (e.g. a blank or newline):

John ate some piece of fruit, viz.\ an apple, i.e.\ he devoured it.

This will handle most abbreviations correctly, but in some special cases one needs to consult the fine print of a Latex manual.

kowthese-0.4

Is now available for download: kowthese-0.4.pdf

As usual,

darcs get http://www.loria.fr/~kow/kowthese

H thinks I should take tomorrow off in good conscience. May follow.

best conversation ever

About translating my abstract into French.

E: Je pensais le faire juste pour rigoler
H: Non, ça ne me ferait pas rire

still alive?

Got back from H+F's place sunday afternoon. Was very well taken care of (for which, merci, if she/they ever read this), and H went to great great lengths not only to give me a translation, but a good translation, sometimes better than the original. (The depressing thing is that I think my writing sucks, now. Stumbled over places where I must have just written things to be deliberately confusing, which I seem to do a lot. Truth hurts. Deal.)

Monday was just too... dunno... worn out. Stayed home. Watched TV shows uploaded on YouTube (sigh, what's the point of not having a television if you're still going to break down and go marathon). Procrastinated on darcs stuff. Did absolutely nothing. Oh, and my hot water tank is leaking. Génial, huh?

Slacked off this morning again, but finally gave myself the requisite kick in pants. Been at the thesis since then. Wrote up something about statistical surface realisation. Hope its not stupid. Hey, I really hope I will be smarter about this after Brighton. Still worried about what JC has to say about IAF and what JLR has to say about polarities. Marked off the bits I remembered changing in v0.2 for C, printed out my thesis, bound it (the relieuse isn't working so greate), put little post-its in the pages that have changed. Got H's latest comments and tweaks (merci, merci). Got P's comments on intro, conclusion and ch7.

Not dead yet.

latex trick

P showed me a great TeX trick, one which I have sort of been using for macros (begin{environment}) but never thought to apply to this most basic of problems. Footnotes:

blah blah blah blah.%
\footnote{here}

Yes! Now I can separate my footnotes from the rest of the text!

8 days left?

Losing count. Didn't get a chance to koweynlg last two days, and as a result, have completely forgotten what I've been up to. Check the darcs logs I suppose. Alright, three scary bits remain:

1. Still think I am being an idiot about delayed modifier insertion and index accessibility filtering. Finally broke down and sent JC a mail. Not exactly pride, not exactly fear of looking stupid, mostly a feeling of embarrassment for not having contacted him earlier. Just that you keep thinking that if you stare at it hard enough, click, everything will come crashing in. Guess not. Stupid me. I could have said something months ago (except that months ago, I sorta thought I got it)
2. Still don't have anything intelligent to say about why we like symbolic surface realisation. What's really great about the Brighton job is that I get to talk with IK herself, so hopefully I will learn something or just get generally wiser.
3. JLR might still say that my polarity stuff is stupid

Other notes:

• darcs repository is here:

  darcs get http://www.loria.fr/~kow/kowthese

  If you darcs unpull enough changes, you can see why I feel so dumb all the time
• you can also download version 0.3 PDF (with some editors notes)
• the proof-reading brigade wants you! if you're willing to proof around 30 pages of pretend British or pretend EuroEnglish, talk to me...
  

questions to ask (12 days left)

Talking to C about ch6 this morning. Mostly ok (so we're just about good to go).

Two weak spots: most worrying isthe comparison with purely statistical approaches (well, the Halogen stuff says it's hybrid). Not yet sure what the right thing to say is.

Other is ISOFT, what I'm saying about ISOFT is still weak.

Talking to C this morning, having my usual trouble saying useful things to respond to her questions, simple and precise, just still haven't learned the habit of systematically asking myself these things: what do they take as input, do they evaluate, how do they evaluate, where does their data come from? I'm so busy struggling to get the Key Idea and looking for Moving Parts (because that's what I'm most comfortable with/Key Ideas are meaningless until I've seen some Moving Parts, not yet good at thinking abstractly), that I forget to ask myself about the Basics. It goes into the list of things I'm supposed to take away from my years working with C P et al. Quantify. Ask. Read. Look for the Basic Questions. Precise is better than vague. Intuitive is better than pedantic. Assertive is better than waffly. Keep to the point. Not sure I've absorbed the lessons well enough, if I have learned the right things, if I have really gotten the point. Not sure if I can do this, basically, if I can survive the big bad Real-ish research world, where I don't have somebody to underline the unclear parts for me. Ok, well, now is not the time to be flipping out about the pseudo-reality that is post-thesis academia.

Finished putting the summary together. 38 pages. Starting each chapter (section*) on a new page (no odd/even crap, just moving it to the beginning of the page). Basic copy/paste operation. Still haven't made sure it makes any sense, though, which is bad.

Holes left:

1. IAF
2. statistical and symbolic - something smart to say
3. ISOFT parting words
4. refs for flat semantic stuff; now am I saying the right thing?

started working on summary (14 days left)

This morning, I went through C's suggestions for the first chapter and the introduction. So what we have left is to (a) clean up the TAG example [ugh] (b) fix ch6 (c) fix the conclusion (double ugh) (d) fix the IAF stuff (more eek than ugh).

Started putting the summary together. It's in Franglais, because I realised that there are taln07 bits that I can salvage. We have about 10 pages of summary so far, which should cover the état de l'art.