Posts

This post details my contribution for a final group project in CSE 842 - Natural Language Processing at Michigan State University. My group members were Luke Sperling and Xavier Williams. Estimating a text’s readability is useful for many reasons! Educators want to know what books are appropriate for their students, authors want to know what reading level their writing fits with to accommodate their target audience, etc. Readability is an arbitrary score which attempts to create a scale to help readers gauge the difficulty a reader might have when encountering a text. [Read More]

Introduction This post is meant to be a brief overview of my project analyzing data from the Wisconsin X-Ray Microbeam Database for those without a background in phonology. Please email me for more information on this project, or if you have any questions/critiques! When humans speak, each individual phoneme that makes up an utterance is produced as a messy, overlapping acoustic signal without clear boundaries between segments, yet as listeners we’re really good at interpreting these signals. [Read More]

In Thai, there are at least seventeen aspectual `markers', or words that mark aspect on the verb. These words can have multiple functions: some can act as a verb themselves, some cannot. These markers can also occur together but have a number of restrictions on how that can occur. Some can license or block others from occuring; some scope from left to right, and some scope from right to left. Some can appear before the verb, and some afterwards. [Read More]