Blog

How to Write Gooder

November, 2025
After publishing “ How to professor”, several people said they found it helpful, and asked whether I had a similar post on writing. Luckily, we have held an annual writing workshop in the lab for the last few years, so there already was a presentation.

How to professor

January, 2025
It feels not long ago that I was worried about my job applications, but in reality, I have done this long enough that some of my first MSc supervisees are professors of their own now.

Some Thoughts on the Future of NLP Conferences

September, 2017
If you have been to ACL in Vancouver or followed the news on Twitter, you know that it was the biggest conference of its kind. And EMNLP, held in Copenhagen in September, could again claim the same for itself, too, with more than 1200 participants and more long paper submissions than ACL.

It’s All About the He Said, She Said―A Quantitative Analysis of the Three Presidential Debates

October, 2016
It’s All about the He said, She said―A Quantitative Analysis of the Three Presidential Debates The question what constitutes an acceptable sentence is a matter of taste, and would elicit very different answers from a moral philosopher, a linguist, and a logician.

Science’s genius complex

July, 2016
In a recent article in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki outlined how, back in the 1960s, professional athletes considered strength training akin to cheating: either you were good at sports, or you weren’t―training had nothing to do with it.

Fun with Movie Titles

September, 2015
As mentioned before, I sometimes use my academic knowledge of natural language processing for purposes other than research. A friend recently told me about an entertaining game where you gerundivize words in movie titles (i.

How usable is sentiment analysis?

September, 2015
Recently, I was interviewed by two students for a study on the business application of natural language processing technique called sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis takes as input a text (which can be anything from a sentence, a tweet, or a paragraph, up to an entire document), and tries to predict the general attitude expressed therein: usually divided into positive, negative, or neutral.

Wow: Such Meme, Much NLP, Very Generate!

September, 2015
I love natural language processing, I really do. I think it has the potential to make the world a little bit better, and like all things worth exploring, it also has the potential to do evil.

Are our models ageist?

July, 2015
A number of comedies hinge on the premise of a young and an old person switching bodies. When a 45-year-old business woman says “’sup dudes?”, we find this funny (at least some of us), because it goes against our expectations of how people speak.

What I do: Learning whom to trust

January, 2015
Here, I’ll try to explain another paper I have worked on in generally understandable terms. This time, it’s about learning whose opinion we can trust. Say you are thinking of watching “Interstellar”.