Celebrating Tom Wasow: A Festschrift

At this year’s CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Emily Bender and Jennifer Arnold presented a Festschrift celebrating Thomas Wasow. Here’s what the publisher’s site (CSLI) says (picture taken from the publisher’s website, which is hopefully ok; see the book for copyrights):

This book is a collection of papers on language processing, usage, and grammar, written in honor of Tom Wasow to commemorate his career on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Tom is a professor of linguistics and philosophy. But more accurately, he is a renaissance academic, having done work that connects with many different disciplines, including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and philosophy. Appropriately, this book reflects the diversity of Tom’s research and interests, including topics from multiple branches of linguistics and human information processing. These papers are written with minimal background assumed, so they can be used as teaching materials for beginning scholars. As such, this volume is a tribute to what is perhaps Tom’s most lasting contribution to the field—the mentorship and inspiration he provided to his students and collaborators, many of whom have contributed to this volume.

The book contains introductory and overview articles on a variety of topics in cognitive science from Emily M. Bender, Dan Flickinger, Stephan Oepen, Ash Asudeh, Peter Sells, Amy Perfors, James Paul Gee, John R. Rickford, T. Florian Jaeger, Jennifer E. Arnold, Harry J. Tily, Neal Snider, John A. Hawkins, and Susanne Riehemann.

Compiling TGrep2 on an Intel Macintosh

When TGrep2 (Ed: a search tool for syntactic corpora in Penn Treebank format) was originally written, all Macs were PPC, but since late 2006 all Macs have been x86 and newer ones are even x86_64. In order to compile tgrep2 on an Intel Mac you have to make some small modifications to the TGrep2 and DRUtils source directories before you compile. This fix at least works on MacOS X 10.5 and 10.6. (Apologies for WordPress mangling the <code> blocks.)

First the patch for DRUtils:

Extracting speaker meta-data from the BNC

This post is looong overdue… – in January of 2009 Ben Van Durme and I reparsed the BNC with the Charniak-Johnson parser and encoded it for TGrep2, with the cool extra feature that each sentence node is now linked to a set of meta-data about the text itself and about the speaker/author. We wrote a little python script that takes TGrep2 match IDs and gives you a file with the meta-data for all sentences that match the TGrep2 IDs. For the written part of the BNC, the following information is available: medium, genre, domain, age and sex of intended audience, size of the text in words, date of publication, and age and gender of the author. For the spoken part: age, sex, social class, dialect/accent, first language, level of education of the speaker, as well as whether or not the speaker was recruited.
This makes it a neat resource for psycho- and sociolinguistic research. If you’re interested in using it (and have a license for the BNC), let us know.