issues/op-eds

Access to lexical databases: discussion

Submitted by ebender on Tue, 05/17/2011 - 20:10

Claire Bowern has started a discussion on her blog, Anggarrgoon, about access to aggregated lexical data: how to protect the rights of the various stake holders while encouraging as much sharing as possible. I enjoyed her tongue-in-cheek suggestion that linguist-contributors should, in game-theoretic fashion, get access to data in proportion to the data they share.

Meta: Spam filters and comments

Submitted by ebender on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 13:53

issues/op-eds

We have had serious issues with spam comments on this blog, and so the spam filters are tuned to be fairly aggressive. If you find that your (legitimate) comments are being rejected as spam, please contact me and I'll try to make sure you can be heard!

Data provenance and data aggregation

Submitted by jcgood on Mon, 04/25/2011 - 18:34

Peter Austin, over at Endangered Languages and Cultures, has initiated a discussion on citation practices (with James McElvenny also participating), and it was prompted (at least partly) by some data I have had a role in processing as part of the LEGO project.

Reproducibility in computational science

Submitted by ebender on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 10:59

The AAAS meeting going on right now includes a symposium on The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer. Mark Liberman is speaking at it, and has posted the symposium abstract as well as some remarks at Language Log.

Beyond the PDF?

Submitted by jcgood on Mon, 01/24/2011 - 16:51

While looking for something on this blog http://cameronneylon.net/category/blog/ (which I recommend in general), I stumbled on the fact that an interesting workshop recently took place entitled Beyond the PDF. The workshop goal is described as follows:

Open Data and corpora for (computational) linguistic research

Submitted by ebender on Tue, 01/18/2011 - 15:52

I recommend this guest post by Nancy Ide over on the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog. Ide gives a brief history of the ANC, and describes issues pertaining to creative commons licensing and copyright that arise when textual data are repurposed for linguistic and computational linguistic research.

A Grand Challenge for Linguistics: Scaling Up and Integrating Models

Submitted by ebender on Wed, 09/29/2010 - 10:57

In response to NSF's call for White Papers in the SBE 2020 Initiative, Jeff Good and I have submitted a paper outlining our take on Cyberinfrastructure for Linguistics, why its necessary, and how it can come about. The abstract:

Abney & Bird's Grand Challenge: The Human Language Project

Submitted by ebender on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 22:24

Steven Abney and Steven Bird published a provocative paper (.pdf) at ACL 2010 calling on the computational linguistics community to work to create a "Universal Corpus", an undertaking that they compare in both scale and potential impact to the Human Genome Project. Here is the abstract:

Invitation from NSF/SBE for white papers describing grand challenges

Submitted by terry on Sun, 08/15/2010 - 19:22

The NSF Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) released last week a Dear Colleague Letter inviting members of the research community (individuals and groups) to submit by September 30th, 2,000-word-maximum white papers outlining what they think are "grand challenge" questions in the fields supported by SBE "that are both foundational and transformative". These contributions will be used to help the Directorate make plans to support research over the coming decade and beyond.

Inspiring article about data sharing

Submitted by stiv on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 11:39

issues/op-eds

NYTimes: Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/health/research/13alzheimer.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&hp