Language Log

There's an extraordinary amount of anticipation about Barack Obama's inaugural address, due in a few hours. A small sample of the anticipatory commentary: "The speech"; "'The Speech': An Experts' Guide"; "Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present"; "Obama's Inaugural Address: Great Expectations"; and literally thousands of other articles. We've contributed our mite, in the form of Geoff Pullum's post "Presidential inaugurals: the form and the content", 1/15/2009 (though this belongs to a somewhat smaller body of work, the meta-anticipatory commentary). No doubt after the event there'll an even greater flood of discussion, meta- and otherwise.

The latest xkcd:

The mouseover title: "And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined."

For the last few days, I've been in Düsseldorf for the Berlin 6 Open Access conference, where I organized a session on "Open Data and Reproducible Research". Here's the abstract:

In many scientific and technical fields, research is increasingly based on published data. Researchers also often publish detailed instructions or even executable recipes for reproducing their results. Combined with inexpensive networked computing and mass storage, these trends can radically accelerate the pace of research, by lowering barriers to entry and decreasing the time required to reproduce and extend innovations. These changes may also modify the balance between data collection and data analysis, and between experimental and theoretical work.

Nevertheless, these potentially revolutionary developments are mostly happening below the surface, with uneven progress across disciplines, and little general discussion of how to guide or react to the process. The goal of this panel is to publicize the experience of several communities who have up to two decades of experience with what Jon Claerbout has termed "reproducible research", and to begin a general discussion of the broader implications for scientific, technical and scholarly publication.

For your edification and amusement: An articulator-based, rather than acoustic, speech synthesis device.

The original context, here on Botjunkie, says that the ultimate goal is a voice compression system for cellphones. I'm a bit confused about this — I *think* that the idea is that representing speech articulatorily will be less data-intensive than representing it acoustically, but that seems wildly improbable to me.

Here's the description of the system on the Takanishi Labs page. Amazingly, they even have a rubber set of vocal cords at work! (scroll down to see them in action).

I didn't make it to ACL2008 back in June, but Ani Nenkova, who was the tutorials chair, recently sent me a link to some really terrific slides from a tutorial by Christopher Collins, Gerald Penn and Sheelagh Carpendale on "Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics". (Warning: it's a 13.8 MB .pdf file).