Dick Tracy

Since I am fed up with having to google these two whenever I need to explain to someone why my plans are possible, albeit non-trivial, here they are:

Dick-Tracy paper on Unified Lexicon and on Transfer "semantics".

Oops forgot another important one, Crouch on KR and semantics,  2005.

Being thankful...

Araquem Alcantara is an amazing photographer. I want to buy all his books...but despite the beautiful picture of the Mata Atlantica, this post is only about good stuff that happened to me this week as far as work is concerned.

So the paper with Patricia, Cleo and Annie ("Where's the meeting that was cancelled?") was accepted for the COLING workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon. The reviewers don't seem to agree with me that inferential aspects are the main cognitive issue that the lexicon needs to address, but they found the work intriguing enough to accept it for the workshop. Good. There are lots of inferential aspects to the lexicon, we only touched some in the paper, which continues the work on Computing Relative Polarity for Textual Inference,  Context Inducing Nouns and Simple and Phrasal Implicatives. (I don't know if Lauri or Annie have written about the work on inferential aspects of adjectives/adverbs, but I guess they must have too.) Anyway this project is big and there is lots still to do and it would be good to get the lexicographers excited about it.

But there are lots of mundane issues for the workshop, visas, passports, and most of all time. Do I have time to go to Mumbai, India? I love the idea. I thought I did have the time, but  now  that I discovered that I need a new passport for the trip,  a decision  has been taken and I'm not going. sniff...

The paper with Marcela, Ju and Ruy on intuitionistc n-graphs was also accepted for the special issue of the Journal of the IGPL devoted to the Brazilian Logic colloquium EBL. This is good too. But again there are lots to do, as this is the simple first step...

Different first steps in different blog posts, Valeria!

Jabuticaba? always...

Being too busy with the new job to write anything here.

Also elections both here (the zombie apocalipse -- sorry if you feel offended zombies!-- has been averted) and in Brazil (don't know really what to say...) meant much to read, no time to write.

But must remember: early November, later October is jabuticaba (or jaboticaba) time in Brazil.  Next year must organize to be there at the right time! and ask for repeat invitation from  my cousin Alvaro Vaz, who took the beautiful picture...

Shouldn't be too hard. Anonymous was everywhere last Monday with Guy Fawkes little rhyme "Remember, remember the 5th of November..."

Oh well, this is an odd cultural melange, if I've ever seen one: Guy Fawkes, anti-catholicism, anonymous, V for Vendetta,  Sandy, Diwali, elections and jabuticaba...ftw? certainly the jabuticaba.

Flu shot causes cold?

It doesn't make sense, but it's the second time that it happens to me.
So sitting in the couch, feeling really poorly. and downloading software, so I can do some proper work next week.

But I don't know what will happen to the weekend work...

Very late Ada Lovelace Day 2012 picture...

"Computing is too important to be left to men"
Karen Sparck-Jones, 2007.

Shieber post

When Margaret Tatcher resigned in 1990, Karen came to my office in the Computer Lab, shared with several other postdocs, excited by the news. Since I was alone in the office in the early morning, she exclaimed, `oh there is no one here' presumably  for her to tell the good news, turn around and left. I started laughing, the news were really cause for jubilation.

Later on we became good friends and I remember fondly a walk in Nancy, after the conference dinner in 2004, talking about computing, linguistics, marriage and children.

Wayback Machine, I love you! IMLA 1999

I was looking for the data on previous IMLA workshops, as we need to organize the new one, the 6th IMLA, which is happening in Rio de Janeiro, in April 2013, as part of 4th Unilog.

Now the web is vast and things never disappear from it. Unless you want them, that is.

For instance the whole Hypatia archive of pdf papers (kudos to M. Dawson -- I believe-- for creating it in the early nineties) has disappeared without a trace... But I am not going down the rabbit hole of trying to find it. Had enough of rooting around the wayback machine today to find the program of IMLA 1999.

Luckily I did find the IMLA 1999 program and at least one associated page that tells me the program committee and invited speaker. This is enough for one Saturday...

But while I'm at it I must repeat that the Wayback Machine is wonderful. The guys who conceived the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine and that keep it going are my heroes!

Reproducing the program of IMLA  1999 here to have it easily.

Patent win?...

Two great things happened two Mondays ago:

I started working at Nuance Communications in Sunnyvale, yay!

And my patent with Ji Fang, Jessica Staddon and other colleagues in PARC on detecting sensitive content in documents was granted. (Funny, only got to know about it because the guys who sell you wooden plaques told me...)

Now, I do not like the idea of patents at all.
Probably would prefer if we lived in a world where they didn't exist.

But I feel that during  my years at PARC I contributed to several projects where others got  patents and I didn't, which wasn't fair. So this is very sweet!