READING 20h

3h: Application for Academy of Finland

the first big reading challenge was my husband's application for postdoctoral research post at Academy of Finland. I was supposed to give him feedback of his application and at the same time get to know with the system myself. I was surprised by the number of appendices. And the huge amount of work what this application requires as whole.
There were several new words, mainly because of the termonology of biosciences. Yet I could cope with it quite nicely. The parts I proposed to be newly considerated were mainly about the structure and some minor changes some considering the lenght of sentences etc. For the obvious reasons I won't attach the plan here, but I'll bring it over to the next ALMS support meeting.

4h: Life of Pi

We chose this novel by Yann Martel to be the book of our Do-It-Yourself book club.
At the beginning I was confused and unhappy, I really didn't get anything out of the book, it wasn't the language because it was rather easy -if one doesn't count the endless lists of the exotic animals- but something else was bothering me. I was collecting a wordlist at the same time and the constant stops were rather annoying as well.
After Pi got into to boat the story changes, as if the writer would had woken up and really started to write. At the end the book was already interesting. I'll write a review on the book later on, so I won't comment on that further now.

Reading the book together with other students was rewarding though. The discussion were good and I could see different sides of the book. The language in the book was okay but not the best possible. It would be interesting to hear some English speaking person's opinion about the language and the structure.

10h Language technology, Natural Language Processing

In the second period I'll do a course and I need to study the following material in English:

1.  Ruslan Mitkov (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2003, chapters 2, 16, 17, 29, 31, 37.
2.  Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 2.painos, Prentice Hall, NJ, 2008: chapter Introduction.
3.  Arnold Douglas, Lorna Balkan, Siety Meijer, R. Lee Humphreys, Louisa Sadler, Machine Translation: an Introductory Guide, NCC Blackwell, London, 1994, chapters 1 ja 2.
 4. ACM SIGIR eli Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval. http://www.acm.org/sigir/ 5. Ralph Grishmani, chapter 30, Information extraction OHLC. http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/publication/papers/grishman-handbook02.pdf
6. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
7. Timo Lahtisen phd: Automatic indexing: an approach using an index term corpus and combining linguistic and statistical evidence, Helsinki, 2000. http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/yleis/vk/lahtinen/
8. Articlea McTear, "Spoken Dialogue Technology: Enabling the Conversational User Interface" p. 90-104
9. http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html
10. http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.html
11. http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
12. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365168
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Above is listed only part of the course material which we had to study for this course. It was a huge amount of work and something like 90% of material was in English. The biggest challenge in it was the vocabulary being new to me and well the subject of course as well. So I didn't know the words in Finnish but had to learn the whole amount of work in English. At the beginning it was really really difficult and slow. I was scared to miss something if I would read it too quickly through and we also had control questions about the articles to test we had understood the subject properly, sometimes the questions took me couple of days.

The biggest challenge came on that week we were moving. I decided to do the exercise straight away at the beginning of the week when it was published. Luckily I did it because in the end it took me four days (= nights) to do that. What made the exercise so difficult was the language. Or languages. This the majority of the material was in Swedish, something like 60%, 30% was in English and the rest in Finnish. Some examples were in German. I was devastated: my head was a huge circus of languages and I thought I'll never get through this. But somehow I did but to tell the truth I don't think I learned everything so perfectly. So that part is on my schedule during the Christmas holiday, not only I want a good credit but it's really important that I understand all of it straight from the beginning. If I now take it too easy the following courses will be way too difficult and I have no chance to drop off.

As our teacher in linguistics said, we simply need to get used to the english material since it'll be something like 95% of it. That I knew beforehand but still it may be quite tirening sometimes. I still think that one of the biggest gifts one can give to their children is proper skills in English.

But I learned during this course a lot, the vocabulary and the methods, applications, the theory behind it and so on.

1h Short stories

Reading the short stories for our DIY-club was one of the most innovating and useful parts in this course. The stories were so different from style and vocabulary that they really offered in a short time a big amount of language bathing. It was good to read the life of Pi but probably it'd had been much more useful to read e.g. 10-15 different short stories instead.

I'm totally excited of the short stories now and it's so easy to print them out and read one of them to calm down at night before going to sleep.

2h other

Other things I was reading during the course were e.g. "Introducing Phonology" by David Odden. It was the most important material for my course in Phonology and Morphology. We basically got through the whole book. I learned a lot of the vocabulary in general linguistics and was quite excited about it.
The most difficult part was to memorize the terms and names e.g. for the phonological alphabets and their characters and descriptions.

For the work I needed to read for example:
1. http://www.janecos.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=43
2. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/work-atmosphere-affects-workplace-48091.html
3. http://www.ecfmg.org/echo/team-support-ward-clerk.html

Because of work I learned a huge amount of hospital vocabulary as well. It's not exactly the most useful area for me but one never knows what the life brings along to you. Learning words can never be too bad either.

I was also reading magazines, newspapers and articles on internet. That I count more like a free time so I can't really calculate hours for those since I'm doing that anyways on my own.

Reading is the most natural way for me to learn things, I like reading and I would read as much I could.

And of course I was reading several articles etc for other parts in ALMS too: e.g. at the listening part when I was searching for more information about the areas I was observing.