airport blogging, again

Yes, I can't help myself :) It seems that it's turning into a habit that whenever I'm in Heathrow I need to blog. I have little time, as usual, but just enough to tell you how excited I am. This visit is special in so many ways for me and I want to enjoy every minute of it.

Got to go, see you all next year :)

Mai

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy New Year everyone, may all your wishes and mine for 2006 come true.

Mai :)

my new year's project

I thought I'd tell you about it today just in case I forget tomorrow since I won't have time on the 31 st anyway. So, there are lots of things to think about for the new year.. personal dreams, academic goals, crazy wishes, some worries.. And to tell you the truth, this year I have been doing a lot of reflecting on the past year and the coming one more than I ever did in my life, and you know what.. it's kind of fun. At least it makes me feel that my life has become much more interesting and eventful in so many ways. So this year I decided to gather all my scattered thoughts and write them in one email and send it to myself to arrive in one year's time. Yes, it's the email time machine which I'm sure some of you already know about. You can do that at FutureMe.org. I think it's a cool idea, although I can't stop the kind of questions which start with "what if..? followed by negation" from popping in my head. To be honest, I don't know how realistic I can be about my future thoughts, especially that when you actually sit down to write them you're likely to get carried away. And of course it also depends on one's current mood, which is excellent by the way :) Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I won't tell you what I am going to write in this email, but I promise that on 1/1/2007 I'll tell you all about it, hopefully it will all be good news.

p.s.
I found this copyrights note at the bottom of the FutureMe webpage very amusing:

"if you steal anything, we will sic a pack of cute angry girl lawyers on you. for real." :)

Mai

what a splash!

Best quotation from Memoirs of a Geisha (so far):

"We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course."

p.s.
my second brief encounter with snow today was great. hope more is on the way.

Mai

hurraaaaaaaaaaaaaay

It's snowing I tell ya, it's snowing :}

I'm going out.. :} God I love this country..

Mai :}

my very own x-mas

To set the mood for my first Christmas in London, I had to have the right head-wear:


and the right poses:


and the right company (this is Fatima who took all the nice pictures):


and the right x-mas gift:


which I opened under the right x-mas tree (thanks Billy):


then one more right close-up on the steps in Trafalgar Square:


so I had a very nice (and crazy) early x-mas celebration as you can see:


and I was ready for the second half of my Christmas eve:


as I went to share in young Rooshy's first birthday (she's the one in the middle :) ):


who was - at first - very calm and enjoying her birthday quietly with me:


before her world turned upside down (with the help of her own dad):


and I don't want to tell you what happened next :)
[you can see all those photos and more in my flickr account]

Hope everyone enjoyed their day, and:


Mai

emotionally swinging back

So I am thinking about a million things these days, some related to my work and some not (yes, I'm being deliberately vague ;-) ). But here is one thing that seems to combine both. Checking my emails, there was a call for papers for a wonderful workshop:

International Workshop on Emotion: Corpora for Research on Emotion and Affect
which will be held as part of LREC 2006.

Ah.. emotion! Well, before your mind starts wandering away in other directions (like I did), let me assure you that the workshop is for academic purposes :) Actually, the topic is very interesting since there is growing concern about "emotion-oriented systems" which would be able to analyse, express and anticipate emotional reactions in a wide variety of human-machine applications. A key factor in this field is the compilation and analysis of emotion corpora and databases, with the Humaine Emotion-research Network as one good resource for work done in this area.

The workshop as such deals with very interesting questions, including: how can emotional content be described and modelled within a corpus?, which emotion-related features should a corpus describe, and how?, what are the appropriate levels of standardisation?, how can quality be assessed?, in addition to the ethical issues involved in database development and access.

Personally, the most appealing part of the email was this:

"Emotion is reflected in multiple channels - linguistic content, paralinguistic expression, facial expression, eye movement, gesture, gross body movement, manner of action, visceral changes (heart rate, etc), brain states (eeg activity, etc)".

And my mind starts wandering away again.. :)

Mai

mood swings

I want a little sugar
in my bowl
I want a little sweetness
down in my soul
I could stand some lovin'
Oh so bad
Feel so helpless and I feel so sad..

Nina Simone, "I want a little sugar in my bowl"

(better change the "sugar" to "saccharin" ;-) )

Mai

my first x-mas gift

Now it's really starting to feel like Christmas, all thanks to Billy. Today Billy gave me my first proper Christmas gift and card. All I have to do now is resist my desire to open it, wait until Christmas day, find the biggest Christmas tree (probably the one in Trafalgar Square), sit beside it and open my gift.

Till then, I'll just keep on shaking it trying to guess what's in there :)

Mai

another book, another movie

I just started yesterday reading Memoirs of a Geisha, only to realise today that a movie is coming soon in cinemas. It is always interesting to read a story first, visualise it, then see it featured as a movie through someone else's perspective. But I wonder if it's always the case that your own vision is better than any other. Does it depend on the kind of story? I mean, if it's the kind of story like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter (which I haven't read nor watched the movies and don't intend to either) maybe the movies would be more interesting and imaginative than what you think of while reading. But if it's a normal story, with no weird creatures or magical settings, I think it's different. I remember the shock I had when I first watched the movie of the famous love story "Eny Rahela" (I'm leaving) by the great Egyptian novelist Youssef AlSeba'y which was totally below my expectations I formed after I had started reading the book one night and could not stop until 8 am the next day. Maybe in some cases it's better to watch the movie first then read the book?! Anyway, I better finish reading this story fast so I can catch the movie in time.

Mai

the king

I went to see King Kong yesterday. I have mixed feelings about this movie. I think the story has always been unique in a way that made it so popular throughout the years, and of course one would expect the 2005 version of the 1933 original movie to be great. Ok, so there is definitely a 'but' coming.. But, there was something disappointing about this movie. Maybe because I thought it was a bit of a drag in the full hour and 15 minutes before we actually got to see Kong, or maybe because some of the scenes which require special effects seemed too artificial to me. I don't want to say too much and spoil the movie for you (I probably already did, sorry) so I'll just stop. Anyway, I enjoyed the whole night although it was really really cold. Oh, and I was very excited to see the trailer for the sequel of Pirates of the Carribean, that's one movie I'll be waiting for.

p.s.
I really enjoyed watching a replay of the X Factor this morning and listening to some wonderful songs like "Let it be", "Over the rainbow", and "When a man loves a woman". Then I realised that the final result was announced yesterday, so I quickly checked online. I would've voted for Andy.

Mai

by the way..

In case you haven't really scrolled down much lately on my blog, I did set up a flickr account for my photos some time earlier this month. I didn't really give it much work but it's a start. This one is the latest addition. I haven't been on campus for over a week, but at least the last place I have been seen in TP is the library, posing for a mobile phone camera :)

Mai

analogies

So I have been "away" in many ways, but I promise to get back to regular postings from now on. Let's start with some very nice analogies.

A fairly-long thread on the Corpora list which started with someone asking about the origin of a particular analogy ended up with some very good examples:

• an analogy comparing the advent of corpora in linguistic studies to the advent of telescopes to sailors (attributed either to Michael Stubbs, John Sinclair, or Geoffrey Leech).
• an analogy comparing the difference between lexis and grammar to the difference between particles and waves (looking at language / light from different points of view).
• an analogy comparing the climate, i.e. the long-term, stable, slowly-evolving language system, to the weather, which includes all the local instances of language features (attributed to Micheal Halliday).

In this discussion, two very interesting (and old) references were mentioned, which I would like to read one day:

Cherry, Colin. (1956). On Human Communication. This book introduces the idea of "quantization" in human language (e.g. expressing the conept of size, the process of transcribing sounds into strings of alphabetic characters)

Pike, Kenneth. (1959). "Language as Particle, Wave, and Field." In The Texas Quarterly 2:2.

They sound pretty scientific, don't they? Well, language, science, music, love.. they all have one thing in common: no matter how much you analyse it, there will always be something you don't quite understand :)

Mai

I'm still here

I know this is probably a record in the number of days I went without blogging, but I'm still here. A lot has happened in the past few days that I don't even know where to start. Maybe I'll just tell you one or two things. First, there is the important news that I am going home in the first two weeks of January. Actually I'll spend new year's eve in the air flying home and trying to figure out are we in 2006 yet or not (depending on which time zone we'll be in). Yeh, I'll miss the countdown and all that but I think this new year's on the fly will be an interesting experience. I wonder if they'll do anything special on the plane that night.

What else? Well, I've been thinking a lot lately about the meaning of these lines:

Far, far from each other
Our spirits have grown
And what heart knows another?
Ah! who knows his own?

Matthew Arnold, "Parting"

Mai

the pragmatics of mincedmeat pies and christmas crackers

So today I was introduced for the first time to two important Christmas-related phenomena: mincedmeat pies and christmas crackers. First let me tell you that I was invited today to attend a talk at the British Computer Society about a Machine Translation system called Deja Vu. It was interesting to see a demo of the system in action, and as usual I asked the presenter if he could show us an example with Arabic texts. But since he didn't know the language, he couldn't answer my question about how would grammar diacritics (tashkeel تشكيل) be dealt with in the system and integrated into the translation memory or the database. But he gave us a cd of a trial version of the system, so maybe I'll just try that myself.

Then after the talk we went for dinner in a nice restaurant in the old Covent Garden market. This is where the Christmas fun began. We were 7 people all together, all very nice academics with a great sense of humour and interest in computational linguistics and translation. So where does pragmatics come in? Well, as I was checking their Christmas menu for dessert I read that they have mincedmeat pies, and I thought : that's odd! how come they have minced meat as a dessert? Contextual assumption missing: a mincedmeat pie does not have minced meat, it actually has fruit and it's very sweet. I had to try it anyway. So it came with some clotted cream on the side and that tasted exactly like butter to me. But it was nice. The other pragmatically interpreted part was when they gave us all christmas crackers. So I learned how you are supposed to open them (it takes two people each pulling from one side) and in there were crackers, balloons, coloured stripes, paper crowns, and jokes. We went around reading aloud our jokes. Let me give you two examples:

What lies on the seabed and quivers?
A nervous wreck.

What is long, green and goes hith, hith?
A snake with a lisp.

Aren't they pragmatically interesting? :) But I think one important contextual assumption here is that Christmas jokes are not supposed to be really funny :) The ones that were funny were the so-called "mummy mummy jokes" which one of the academics told us about. They generally go like this:

A: mummy, mummy, why is dad running in the garden?
B: shut up and help me load the shot gun.

It was a very fun evening, acedemically and personally. I came home about half an hour ago, with a lot of coloured stripes wrapped around my neck :) (and I am also wearing the paper crown now :) )

Mai

the perfect lines

What is the perfect thing to read when you are working on the demonstratives, in winter, and on a Tuesday?

On Tuesday, when it hails and snows
The feeling on me grows and grows
That hardly anybody knows
If those are these, or these are those

A. A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh

(p.s. I cheated this off a paper on demonstratives)

Mai

is it really the holidays?

Went to see Keeping Mum the other day. It's a really nice movie, with very funny bits, not much of a story though. And I also think they could have come up with a better title. But the really fun part of my night in town, besides the great company, is feeling the festive atmosphere all around with the colourful lights all over Oxford Street and Regent Street, and the very lively Leicester Square and Covent Garden, and many people walking around. It makes you feel it's really the holidays, which is very exciting for me since it's my first Christmas in Europe and my idea of Christmas celebrations comes only from (mostly American) movies. Of course, a perfect Christmas for me (and probably half the earth's population) would be a White one with lots and lots of snow, but unfortunately, in London, one can only hope.

On the other hand, on campus today, I was walking past one of the studios as someone in there was playing the piano and singing:

Cellophane, mister cellophane
Should have been my name
Mister cellophane
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I'm there

Poor guy! I was about to go in and tell him he should sing something more in line with the spirit of the holidays, but.. the other people in a different studio were doing a bang-up job with the drums :)

Mai

what's your blog mood today?

Just stumbled on a very nice paper called Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts, which, as the title indicates, looks into automatically classifying blog posts by mood, i.e. predicting the blogger's state of mind at the time of writing. Before getting carried away and thinking "wow, computers can do that?", you might ask first what's the importance of this? Well, the obvious benefit I guess is that it provides new insights into automatic text analysis which is the main gate to a whole world of quering and searching and extracting and retrieving data. In the paper, the author says it also has practical applications in "assisting behavioral scientists and improving doctor-patient interaction", but for me this is not exactly clear. Anyway, one of the interesting things in this study is that it depends on a blog corpus compiled from the free weblog service Livejournal, which, conveniently enough, provides its users with an optional field called "current mood". Of course this does not just make the study easier since moods can mean different things to different people, but it also provides first-hand information. According to this initial classification by the bloggers themselves, the first top five blog moods are:

1. amused
2. tired
3. happy
4. cheerful
5. bored

I thought being bored would be higher up in the list a bit. After all, why am I blogging to you about this in the first place? :) just kidding. And of course when you get right down to the textual analysis, other linguistically interesting points come up. For example, there is the issue of the 'semantic orientation' of both the blog post in general and the individual words themselves (mainly verbs and nouns).

Generally, anything that has to do with human emotions is extremely complicated. Therefore, it was not surprising when the author argues that: "the classification accuracy, although low, is not substantially worse than human performance on the same task".

Well, just in case anyone includes my blog in a similar future study, here is my mood now: a little bit jaded, but still entertained, as well as considerably cranky, in addtion to being curious, to an extent confused and probably slightly crazy. Deal with that :)

Mai

omar al khayyam

I recently came across those lines at the beginning of a chapter about writing systems in a book about language:

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

These are probably the most famous lines of his Ruba'iyat (i.e. quatrains) which were first translated from Persian to English in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald. I don't know why most references to Omar Al-Khayyam drop the definite prefix "Al" from his surname (much like Omar Al Mokhtar too) although it is part of the name. Anyway, my Google search about him resulted in many English, and a few Arabic, websites with information about him and his work. The focus is primarily on his poetry, but it was interesting too to be reminded of his other achievements in algebra, trignometry, astronomy, not to mention that he was a bit of a philosopher as well. I was mainly searching for a complete translation of his poetry, and as I was just about to give up, I landed on this wonderful site which has, as I hope is, the complete original Fitzgerald translation. I also came across this site which includes some of the original Persian lines together with literal and meaning translations, English translation and German translation. Finally, I found this site which has the Arabic translation of some of the Ruba'iyat, done by the brilliant Egyptian poet Ahmad Ramy and sung by the legendary Um Kolthum (whose picture is in the background). The first Arabic lines start with:

سمــعت صـوتا هاتــفا فى السحـــر / نادى من الغــــيب غفاة البشر

هبوا املأوا كــأس المــــنى قبل أن / تملأ كأس العـــمر كف القدر

which are the equivalent of the English:

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life's liquor in its cup be dry."

But, I think my personal favourite are those (and not just because of 'this' and 'that' ;-) ):

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of this and that endeavor and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, fruit.

Mai

weblogging ecosystems

To all those who are interested in more than just blogging, this is very interesting:

The Third International Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems, May 2006, Edinburgh, UK.

Its main interests include research related to textual, visual, graphical and sociological analyses of the blogosphere.

I like the idea of using the term "ecosystem", and its associations of being a "microcosm" and experiencing a process of "evolution".

This is the website of the Second Workshop (Chiba, Japan, 2005) and this is the website of the First Workshop (New York, 2004) where most papers are downloadable, very cool stuff.

Mai