Thursday, December 31, 2015

OWN-PT Logo, yay!

Zach Sanchez provided a beautiful logo for OpenWordNet-PT.

The colours shows that we start from Brazil, but want to encompass Portugal and the other Portuguese speaking countries. The network says that we want to be part of the big resources in the Semantic Web, more specifically of the Linked Open Data networks.  The shape  of the net should remind you of a lambda, as our implementation was basically in Lisp and we value our functional programming origins. The dashed indicates that we're not complete and we hope people will help to make it better!

Yes, I think we covered all the bases.

This year wasn't as good as 2014 for the work on lexical resources. We actually only had three (make it two) papers accepted. I must be getting worse at writing stuff, since there were 8 (yay!) in 2014. Maybe it's the problem with focusing getting worse (very interesting but full of distractions blog post here). May be it's just the ups and downs of getting stuff done and then writing about it, I don't know. Must make sure I don't get disheartened by all the stuff that didn't get anywhere.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Can you make stress your friend?

SAY is a hidden gem of Stanford.
and Psychology a fascinating and baffling subject.

Maybe you should watch this.

As she says, it may save your life.

How to make stress your friend

(picture of traffic lights by Gary Smith)

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Language nerd

This week I gave a talk to the Nuance Sunnyvale Research Lab on the work on OpenWordNet-PT that I'm doing with friends in Brazil, Alexandre, Livy, Fabricio, e Claudia, amongst others.

I talked about work that we have been doing since Sept 2014, when Fabricio joined us, and that I had decided  needed to be written up for a workshop in the summer.  The official venue, the ACL-LDL workshop apparently worked well and Alexandre gave the talk in Beijing. Semantic Web and Linked Data (Linguistic or not) are much more his cup of tea than mine.

The talk was ok (any talk given is better than a talk still to  give), but the audience was very focused on a problem that I do not have solutions for, yet. Anyways, giving talks is also about getting things clearer on your mind. Not only what you want to do next and how to do it, but also, a bit surprisingly, the things you've done already and what/why the panning the way they did, actually means to you. The slides are in slideshare (Seeing is Correcting) and I really need to get my act together and list all the talks,  the papers, the drafts,  the code that I have been working on organized.