Language Notebook Transformation
I began learning English language at school in Russia 30 years ago at the age of 9 but wasn’t really any good at it. Rather I was interested in natural sciences (see my Vector Space Chemistry post) after an idea struck me that I could learn them on my own even before they were taught at my school or a university. However at the age of 15 another idea struck me that not only I could learn more about English language myself to improve my marks but also to study other languages as well like Latin and French. I took some guides in the local library but didn’t progress much. At Moscow State University I never paid attention to English language and progressed only in technical English mainly after reading twice Petzold’s book about Windows 3.x programming. Since then I improved my written technical English after working several years remotely for US companies. All changed by the end of 2000 when I decided to take an employment in Ireland mainly to see abroad and improve spoken English. in 2003 I joined a company specializing in C++ static analysis tools and became more proficient in C++ grammar. This sparked my renewed interest in the grammar of natural languages and linguistics in general. I started reading more and more English books about different subjects and began writing down vocabulary and pronunciation notes in numerous paper notebooks. After 1.5 years I was made redundant and that put a pause on my linguistic education for a while. Later I joined Citrix and became interested in the low level stuff again, especially in memory dump analysis. Recently an idea came to me to began writing language notes again and being a blogger suggested me to open a blog for this purpose.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ LanguageMemory.com -
AnnouncementsComing Soon:
Fundamentals of Complete Crash and Hang Memory Dump Analysis
Management Bits: An Anthology from Reductionist Manager
Debugging Notebook: Essential Concepts, WinDbg Commands and Tools
Crash Dump Analysis for System Administrators and Support Engineers
New Magazines:
Debugged! MZ/PE: MagaZine for/from Practicing Engineers
New Books:
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology: Color Supplement for Volumes 1-3
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 3
First Fault Software Problem Solving: A Guide for Engineers, Managers and Users
x64 Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations
Also available:
Windows Debugging: Practical Foundations
DLL List Landscape: The Art from Computer Memory Space
Dumps, Bugs and Debugging Forensics: The Adventures of Dr. Debugalov
WinDbg: A Reference Poster and Learning Cards
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 2
Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 1
New Children's Book:
February 13th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
[…] Language Notebook Transformation […]
February 15th, 2009 at 4:10 am
Natural Language Understanding - Yet another subject of mutual interest. I spent a few months at Apple working on a natural language oriented programming language. The language had a large collection of phrase-rules like: Add X to Y -or- Put the on the . These would expand out into procedural statements that would do what was indicated.
I used a “chart parser” architecture to cope with the highly ambiguous parse trees involved. How did I pick the one that was best? I thought - grade them all on how complex they were and pick the simplest possible. It worked pretty well. Later, the statistical analysis of language crowd came to the same conclusion. It turns out that Dr. Chomsky and his friends had spent a lot of time looking for a complex explanation for something that wasn’t.
I have always wanted to do a visualization of a parse tree intended to aid humans in figuring out foreign languages. Draw the diagram with labels on the branches and display lexicon entries for the words. Its like what you would do to translate a language when all you had was a dictionary - and let the human mind grasp the higher structure from the boost provided by having the lexical definitions brought readily to hand.