Location: Group 3: Tools (existing and future "killer apps")

Discussion: some applications to add?Reported This is a featured thread

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mebeckman
mebeckman
some applications to add?
Jul 12 2009, 7:48 PM EDT | Post edited: Jul 12 2009, 7:48 PM EDT
Here are some things that I would think of as killer apps in my corner of language:
R (http://www.r-project.org/) and the sub-communities and packages related to linguistics research that it has enabled, such as Emu (http://emu.sourceforge.net/), as well as new approaches to teaching statistics and numerical reasoning to linguists (see, e.g., http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~vasishth/SFLS.html and http://www.ualberta.ca/~baayen/#statistics)
WebExp (http://www.webexp.info/) and related applications facilitated by languages such as Java, Python, etc.
Praat (praat.org) for the way that it is free and very easy for even high school students to learn how to use


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mebeckman
mebeckman
1. RE: some applications to add?
Jul 12 2009, 7:50 PM EDT | Post edited: Jul 12 2009, 7:50 PM EDT
also what about apps such as:
http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/elan-description Do you find this valuable?    

robert_forkel
2. RE: some applications to add?
Jul 13 2009, 2:41 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 13 2009, 2:41 AM EDT
from my perspective (as a programmer :)) general tools like R or even Python would definitely make sense to add. and i also think that students should be taught using these if possible. as soon as people know how to program, quite a few infrastructure needs may go away. Do you find this valuable?    

robert_forkel
3. RE: some applications to add?
Jul 13 2009, 2:46 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 13 2009, 2:46 AM EDT
honestly, i'm not sure yet about what we want to achieve with the list of existing tools. make it comprehensive? categorized? in any case, not being a linguist myself, i depend on suggestions like yours, but would like to stick to tools people actually have experience working with.

right now i'm leaning more towards trying to find out what makes some apps more usable than others and maybe come up with recommendations based on this. for this goal our working group might be in a good position since it can provide usability perspectives from linguists and programmers (i.e. potential infrastructure providers) alike. Do you find this valuable?    
mebeckman
mebeckman
4. RE: some applications to add?
Jul 13 2009, 1:32 PM EDT | Post edited: Jul 13 2009, 3:35 PM EDT
From my perspective (as a linguist working on non-text data ;->), I would be astonished if the infrastructure needs that we have on this end would go away simply by teaching students how to use R and Python (although of course I make sure all of my students do know how to use these kinds of general tools). If there were a FOS version of MatLab, then we could add that to this list, but since there isn't, I think Praat is a good stand-in for the kinds of general signal processing tool that we need. It also has the advantage that many linguists are getting more and more experience using Praat and some are building useful extensions (such as Akustyk) and there is the potential for an emerging community of people who know the praat scripting language well enough to be able to share and adapt scripts. (Of course, Praat does not yet have anything that is analogous to the HTK toolkit of MatLab, so that could be a needed tool, or a needed extension to Praat.)

I should add that I suggested looking at, e.g., ELAN, since I would imagine that there are comparable tools needed for annotating and searching video data.

It's important to remember that not all computational linguists work on text-based NLP and that there are many other aspects of language and linguistics that cannot be addressed with the kinds of data that can be developed, annotated, extended, shared, examined, and modeled by tools such as the ones that are listed on this wiki page now.
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robert_forkel
5. RE: some applications to add?
Jul 14 2009, 3:18 AM EDT | Post edited: Jul 14 2009, 3:18 AM EDT
saying that infrastructure needs would go away was a bit overstating it, i admit.

what i basically wanted to say is, feel free to add these tools right on the wiki page. as non-linguist and only involved with text data so far, i'm in no position to even have an opinion about them. Do you find this valuable?