Fear and Loathing in Linguistics

The Fear and Loathing Continues

2011-10-18T21:34:00.001-07:00

on howlingmime's blog.

Enjoy.

F Linguistics.

plenty of vultures out here

2007-01-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

"Good luck," said my advisor. "We had a real funk on our hands. That algorithm made me nervous. Did you see its runtime? He was still laughing. "Dynamic programming," he said. "That's a good algorithm!"

I opened the code and scrolled down to the tree kernel. "Move over," I said. "I'll code. I have to get this thing working before the next deadline."

"Shit, that'll be weeks," said my advisor. "That's hundreds of hours from now."

"So it is," I said.

"Let's head out and hear a book reading," he said. "We can get work done there."

I ignored the reading. "A large coffee," I yelled at the barista as the brainstorm took over again. I pounded on the keyboard as I hurtled back into the code. An hour later he leaned over with some friends. "There's a place 'round the block called Headhunters," he said. "As your advisor, I advise you to stop and take a break."

I shook my head. "It's absolutely imperative that we get this thing working before the deadline to ACL," I said. "Otherwise, we'll have to wait until next year."

He nodded. "But let's forget all that nonsense about the hardening of the software dream," he said. "The important thing is the great results dream." He was hacking around in the sourse code. "I think it's about time to chew up some CPU," he said. "That cheap single processor unit ran for a long time, and I don't know if I can stand to wait for the results any longer."

"I like it," I said. "We should distribute the lab with this code and run experiments all night, so the log files fill up all the way to the conference."

He was flipping through iTunes. The laptop was screaming out Portishead beats ten years old. "The poor fool should have just kept up his research trajectory," said my advisor. "Punks like that just get in the way when they bite off more than they can code."

"Speaking of code," I said. "I think it's about time to get into the Eliot and the___."

"Forget Eliot," he said. "Let's save it for soaking down the models in the training. But here's this. Your half of the Tom Wolfe. You'll blow through it like bubble gum."

I took the Wolfe and ate it. My advisor was now tweaking the code containing the feature extraction. Opening it, optimizing it. Then pointing and explaining to me where my loops went awry, as my code went all wonky on this day. A very expensive bug arising from the tree comparison module. "Oh, jesus!" he moaned. "Did you see what God just did to us?"

"God didn't do that!" I shouted. "I did. I'm having a fucking hard time concentrating! I knew this would happen from the start, you dig!"

"You better stay focused," he said. And suddenly he was waving a fat black .357 module at me. One of those snubnosed Python programs with the iterators and the generators. "Plenty of vultures out here," he said. "They'll pick your code clean before morning."

my head feels like a gelatinous cube!

2006-04-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

But our project was different. It was a new implementation of everything right and true and decent in the Redwoods Treebank. It was a gross, dynamic programming salute to the fantastic possibilities of parse selection in this corpus -- but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

My advisor understood this concept, despite his academic position, but our prospective student was not an easy person to hack. S/he said s/he understood, but I could see in hiser eyes that s/he didn't. S/he was lying to me.

The code suddenly veered off the schedule and we came to a screeching halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the review board. My advisor was slumped over the desk. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is the normal form of the perceptron!"

"My tenure," he groaned. "Where's the rhetorical argument?"

"Oh," I said. "The argument, yes, it's right here." I reached into the book-bag for the Ellison. The kid seemed petrified. "Don't worry," I said. "This man has a good idea -- Ensemble Models. But we have no results for the dual-form perceptron. Yes, here they are." I picked four stories out of the Alone Against Tomorrow and handed them to my advisor. He immediately cracked it open and started reading, and I did likewise.

He read "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and fell back into the seat, staring straight up at the sun. "Turn up the fucking Portishead!" he screamed. "My head feels like a Gelatinous Cube!"

"Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass!" He flailed his naked arms at the sky. "What's wrong with us? Are we goddamn code monkeys?"

I turned both the radio and iTunes up full bore. "You scurvy shyster bastard," I said. "Watch your language! You're talking to a doctor of kernelism!"

He was laughing out of control. "What the fuck are we doing out here in this lab?" he shouted. "Somebody call the police. We need help!"

"Pay no attention to this guy," I said to the prospective. "He can't handle the Ellison. Actually, we're both doctors of kernelism, and we're on our way to ACL to cover exponentially-sized feature sets for parse selection." And then I began laughing . . .

My advisor hunched around to face the prospective. "The truth is," he said, "we're going to ACL to subvert a ling baron named Chomsky. I've known him for years, but he ripped us off -- and you know what that means, right?"

I wanted to shut him off, but we were both helpless with laughter. What the fuck were we doing here in the lab, when we both had sleep deprivation?

"Chomsky has cashed out!" my advisor snarled at the kid in the back seat. "We're going to rip his theories out!"

"And eat them!" I blurted. "That bastard won't get away with this! What's going on in this field when an entrenched MIT professor like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of kernelism?"

Nobody answered. My advisor was cracking another Ellison and the kid was climbing out of the back seat, scrambling down the trunk of the tree. "Thanks for the derivation," s/he yelled. "Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don't worry about me." Hiser feet hit the asphalt and s/he started running back toward computer science. Out in the middle of the lab, no parse tree in sight.

"Wait a minute," I yelled. "Come back and get an account." But apparently s/he couldn't hear me. The music was very loud, and s/he was moving away from us at a good speed.

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.

Terminal.app psychosis

2005-11-18T02:26:00.000-08:00

I am still vaguely haunted by our student's remark about how s/he'd "never rode in a Chom-ski before." Here's this poor geek living in a world of Minimalists zipping past himer in the halls all the time, and s/he's never even ridden on one. It made me feel like Bar-Hillel. I was tempted to have my advisor log onto the next wifi point and arrange some kind of UT department-to-department contract whereby we could just give the theory to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: "Here, sign this and the theory's yours." Give himer the trees and then use the faculty MOU to zap off on a jet to some place like TACC and rent another huge fireapple-red computer for a sleep-deprived, top-speed run across the campus all the way out to the last stop in Calhoun . . . and then trade the computer off for a BSD machine. Keep publishing.

But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up -- and besides, I had plans for the computer. I was looking forward to flashing around the 'Net on the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious algorithm development then head down to the Drag: Walk out to that big stoplight in front of the Church of Scientology and start screaming at traffic:

"Alright, you chickenship wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn code compiles, I'm gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutter punks off the Drag!"

Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to a conference, ranting and raving with Lem's Cyberiad in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music . . . glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed titanium spectacles, screaming gibberish . . . and a genuinely dangerous research assistant, reeking of T.S. Eliot and Terminal.app psychosis. Revving the CPUs up to a terrible high-pitched whirring whine, waiting for the results to change . . .

How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old linguists lock themselves in the ivory tower and drive their students away with obtuse theories.

you should've given him some n-grams

2005-10-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

Getting ahold of the books had been no problem, but the computer and the tape recorder were not easy things to round up at 6:30 on a Friday afternoon on the Drag. I already had one computer, but it was far too small and slow for computational work. We went to a Pizza bar, where my advisor made seventeen calls before locating a workstation with adequate horsepower and proper coloring.

"Hang onto it," I heard him say into the phone. "We'll be over to make the trade in thirty minutes." Then after a pause he began shouting: "What? Of course the student has a major student loan! Do you realize who the fuck you're talking to?"

"Don't take any guff from these swine," I said as he slammed the phone down. "Now we need a sound store with the finest equipment. Nothing dinky. We want one of those new Belgian Heliowatts with a voice-activated shotgun mike, for picking up conversations in oncoming computers."

We made several more calls and finally located our equipment in a store about five miles away in South Austin. It was closed, but the salesman said he would wait, if we hurried. But we were delayed en route when a Mini-Cooper in front of us killed a pedestrian on South Congress. The store was closed by the time we got there. There were people inside, but they refused to come to the double-glass door until we gave it a few belts and made ourselves clear.

Finally two salesmen brandishing tire irons came to the door and we managed to negotiate the sale through a tiny slit. Then they opened the door just wide enough to shove the equipment out, before slamming and locking it again. "Now take that stuff and get the hell away from here," one of them shouted through the slit.

My advisor shook his fist at them. "We'll be back," he yelled. "One of these days I'll toss a fucking Google bomb into this place! I have your name on this sales slip! I'll find out where you live and crack your wifi net!"

"That'll give him something to think about," he muttered as we drove off. "That guy is a paranoid psychotic, anyway. They're easy to spot."

We had trouble, again, at the computer rental agency. After signing all the papers, I logged on and almost lost control of it while hacking across the net to the cvs repository. The rental man was obviously shaken.

"Say there . . . uh . . . you fellas are going to be careful with this computer, aren't you?"

"Of course."

"Well, good god!" he said. "You just hacked over that linksys firewall and you didbn't even slow down! Port-scanning in reverse! And you barely missed the pserver!"

"No harm done," I said. "I always test a distro that way. The backdoors. For stress factors."

Meanwhile, my advisor was busy transferring code and corpora onto the hard drive of the workstation. The rental man watched him nervously.

"Say," he said. "Are you fellas thinking?"

"Not me," I said.

"Just fill the goddamn disk," my advisor snapped. "We're in a hell of a hurry. We're on our way to ACL for a conference."

"What?"

"Never mind," I said. "We're research people." I watched him put the cat 5 on, then I jammed the thing into runmode 3 and we lurched onto the network.

"There's another worrier," said my advisor. "He's probably all cranked up on speed."

"Yeah, you should've given him some n-grams."

"N-grams wouldn't help a pig like that," he said. "To hell with him. We have a lot of business to take care of, before we can get into the conference."

"I'd like to get hold of some discourse corpora," I said. "They might come in handy in parsing."

But there were no corpus sites open, and we weren't up to burglarizing a site. "Why bother?" said my advisor. "And you have to remember that a lot of judges are good vicious critics. Can you imagine what those bastards would do to us if we got busted all wrapped up in the details of specific corpora? Jesus, they'd cast us out!"

"You're right," I said. "And for christ's sake don't type so much at wifi hotspots. Keep in mind that our net's exposed."

He nodded. "We need a big Powerbook. Keep it down here on the seat, out of sight. If anybody sees us, they'll think we're using aome other net."

We spent the rest of the night rounding up materials and packing the disk. Then we ate Snickers bars and went swimming in Barton Springs. Somewhere around dawn we had breakfast at Magnolia Cafe, then drove very carefully across town and plunged into the MoPac expressway, heading North.

free software. the american dream.

2005-08-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

The Department of Linguistics was not familiar with Funding: they referred me to the NSF just a few thousand miles from Calhoun -- but when I got there, the money-woman refused to give me more than an honorable mention. They had no idea who I was, they said, and by that time I was pouring sweat. My topic is too thick for the Feds: I have never been able to properly explain myself in that climate. Not with the soaking sweats . . . wild ideas and trembling hands.

So I took the honorable mention and left. My classmates were waiting in a bar around the corner. "This won't make the nut," they said, "unless we have student loans."

I assured them we would. "You linguists are all the same," I told them. "You have no faith in the essential decency of the Scientific Community. Jesus, just one semester ago we were sitting over there in Jester Hall, stone broke and paralyzed by Minimalism, when a call for applications comes through from some total stranger in Edinburgh, telling me to do computational linguistics and here's a position -- and then he sends me over to some office in the Service Building where another total stranger gives me a few keys to the labs . . . I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We'd be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end."

"Indeed," they said. "We must do it."

"Right," I said. "But first we need the computers. And after that the corpora. And then the iPod, for special music, and some Guyabara shirts." The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like computer scientists and get crazy, then screech off across campus and do the research. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.

But what was the research? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Software. The American Dream. Hunter S. Thompson gone mad on linguistics in Austin. Do it now: pure Gonzo Linguistics.

There was also the sociolinguistic factor. Every now and then when your studies get complicated and the syntacticians start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on semantic theories and then derive like a bastard from Heim and Kratzer. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the Texas sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a poem of Eliot.

Paint me a cavernous waste shore
  Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
  Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

if a thing like this is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right

2005-05-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

Our derivations were getting nasty -- but why? I was puzzled, frustrated. Was there no communication in this class? Had we deteriorated to the level of dumb beasts?

Because my education was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our examples to be made absolutely clear. We had actually seen sitting there in the Showdown -- for many hours -- drinking Shiner Bock by the pitcher with water chasers. And when the call came, we were ready.

The dwarf approached our table cautiously, as I recall, and when he handed me pink cellphone I said nothing, merely listened. And then I hung up, turning my face to my classmates. "That was headquarters," I said. "They want me to go to Linguistics at once, and make contact with a German semanticist named Schwarz. He'll have all the details. All I have to do is register for the class and he'll raise quantifiers."

My classmates said nothing for a moment, then they suddenly came alive in their chairs. "God hell!" they exclaimed. "I think I see the pattern. This one sounds like real trouble! They tucked their t-shirts into their boot cut jeans and called for another drink. "You're going to need plenty of linguistic advice before this thing is over," they said. "And my first advice to you is that you should check out a very fast book with no cover and get the hell out of Austin for at least 48 hours." They shook their heads sadly. "That blows my weekend, because naturally we have to go with you -- and we'll have to arm ourselves."

"Why not?" I said. "If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. We'll need some decent equipment and plenty of cash on the line -- if only for books and a a super-sensitive tape recorder, for the sake of a permanent record."

"What kind of study is this?" they asked.

"The Fall 2005," I said. "It's the next off-the-track semester for linguists and philosophers in the history of institutionalized education -- a fanatic journey in honor of some stuck-up MIT persona named Chomsky, who owns the syntactic Minimalism in the heart of downtown Linguistics . . . at least that's what the literature says; my man in Boston just read it to me."

"Well," they said. "as your classmates we advise you to buy a Minimalist textbook. How else can you cover a thing like this righteously?"

"No way," I said. "Where can we get hold of a Lexicalist Functional Grammar text?"

"What's that?"

"A fantastic theory," I said. "The new model is something like two thousand cubic inches, developing two hundred brake-horsepower at hour hundred revolutions per minute on a lexical frame with two styrofoam brackets and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred pounds."

"That sounds about right for this gig," they said.

"It is," I assured them. "The fucker's not much for exceptions, but it's pure hell on grammaticality. It'll outrun the GB until takeoff."

"Takeoff?" they said. "Can we handle that much torque?"

"Absolutely," I said. "I'll call Boston for some cash."

are you dogmatic?

2005-05-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'd better have a chat with this student, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, s/he'll rest easy.

Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave herim a big smile . . . admiring the shape of hiser skull.

"By the way," I said. "There's one thing you should probably understand."

S/he stared at me, not blinking. Was s/he gritting hiser teeth?

"Can you hear me?" I yelled.

S/he nodded.

"That's good," I said. "Because I want you to know that we're on our way to Linguistics to find the Universal Grammar." I smiled. "That's why we registered for this class. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?"

S/he nodded again, but hiser eyes were nervous.

"I want you to have all the background," I said. "Because this is a very ominous assignment -- with overtones of extreme academic danger . . . Hell, I forgot all about these books; you want one?"

S/he shook hiser head.

"How about some Eliot?" I said.

"What?"

"Never mind. Let's get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty-four hours ago we were sitting on in the back of the Texas Showdown Saloon -- in the patio section of course -- and we were just sitting there under a hackberry tree when this uninformed dwarf came up to me with a pink cellphone and said, 'This must be the call you've been waiting for all this time, sir.'"

I laughed and ripped open a book cover that foamed all over the classroom while I kept talking. "And you know? He was right! I'd been expecting that call, but I didn't know who it would come from. Do you follow me?"

The student's face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment.

I blundered on: "I want you to understand that these students are my classmates! Class-mates! They're not just some dingbats I found on the Drag! Shit, look at them! They don't look like you or me, right? That's because they're linguists. I think they're probably Minimalists. But it doesn't matter, does it? Are you dogmatic?"

"Oh, hell no!" s/he blurted.

"I didn't think so," I said. "Because in spite of their framework, these people are extremely valuable to me." I glanced over at my classmates, but their minds where somewhere else.

I whacked the back of the deriver's seat with my fist. "This is important, goddamnit! This is a true story!" The course swerved sickeningly, then straightened out. "Keep your hands off my fucking Adger!" my classmates screamed. The student in the back looked like s/he was ready to drop right out of the class and take hiser chances in Philosophy.

...or I'll sick Adger on you...

2005-05-07T13:48:00.000-07:00

My classmates saw the first-year long before I did. "Let's give this one a lift," they said and before I could pass any argument they stopped and this poor Texas kid was running up to the car with a big grin on hiser face, saying, "Hot damn! I never taken a syntax class before!"

"Is that right?" I said. "Well, I guess you're about ready, eh?"

The kid nodded eagerly and we roared off.

"We're your friends," said my classmates. "We're not like the others."

O Christ, I thought, they've gone around the bend. "No more of that talk," I said sharply. "Or I'll sick Adger on you." They grinned, seeming to understand. Luckily the noise in the class was so awful -- between the drilling and the banging and the iPod -- that the student in the back row couldn't hear a word we were saying. Or could s/he?

How long can we merge? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raising and joining at this student? What will s/he think then? This same lonely department was once the home of Krifka and Bhatt. Will s/he make that grim connection when my classmates start screaming about Agrs and huge movement coming down on the class? If so -- well, we'll just have to cut off his head position and lower himer somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can't turn himer loose. S/he'll report us at once to some dogmatic Chomskyan law enforcement agency, and they'd run us down like dogs.

Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my classmates, but they seemed oblivious -- watching the board, driving our GB Shark along at a hundred and ten or so. There was no sound from the back row.

one trace over the line

2005-04-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

"Man, this is the way to travel," said my classmates. They leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the rhythm section and kind of moaning the words, "One trace over the line, Sweet Jonas, . . . One trace over the line . . ."

One trace! You poor fools! Wait till you see those goddamn Agrs! I could barely hear the radio . . . slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with an iPod turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only MP3 we had, so we played in constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for GB milage -- and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about GB consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of pseudo-formalism that drag blood to the back of the brain.

...the tendency is to push it as far as you can

2005-04-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

The admissions committee had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous books. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile library. We had two Leaves of Grass, seventy-five pages of The Communist Manifesto, five sheets of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a salt shaker half full of O'Connor, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored Updikes, DeBoises, Sagans, Lao Tsus . . . and also a quart of Lovecraft, a quart of Dylan, a case of Borges, a pint of raw Eliot and two dozen American folk songs.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Travis County -- from Manor to Westlake, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious book collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that worried me was the Eliot. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an Eliot binge.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And I knew we'd get into that lofty stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now -- yes, it was time for a long stanza of Eliot. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on Eliot is to do up a lot of American folk songs -- not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through Barss and Lasnik.

...to facilitate the learning process

2005-04-23T12:15:00.000-07:00

Then it was quiet again. My classmates had taken their backpacks off and were pouring coffee on their chests, to facilitate the learning process. "What the hell are you talking about?" they muttered, staring up at the board with their eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish eyeglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to derive." I hit the books and aimed the G.B. Shark toward the shoulder of the classroom. No point mentioning those Agrs, I thought. The poor bastards will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred pages to go. They would be tough pages. Very soon, I knew, we would all be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Graduate Registration for the fabulous Fall 2005 was already underway, and we had to get there by the 29th to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable academic journal in Austin had taken care of our admission, along with this huge red Minimalist convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Drag...and I was, after all, a professional student; so I had an obligation to cover the class, for good or ill.

maybe you should derive

2005-04-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a linguist." -- paraphrase of Dr. John(s)son

We were somewhere around Barss and Lasnik on the edge of syntax when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should derive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the board was full of what looked like huge trees, all merging and joining and diving around the theory, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Linguistics. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn Agrs?"