"Hitting the ground running" certainly describes my morning aptly.

Here's what my schedule looks like for the fall:




This morning, I met with masaga, pvntejaswi, and martinsamuel, a new M.S. student, in our comptranslation planning meeting.
Today, we talked about the GIZA++ software package for statistical MT (and masaga implementation plan), the BLEU metric, freely available parallel text corpora such as the Canadian Hansards data, and Kevin Knight's tutorials, including his 1999 Statistical MT Workbook.

We also talked about Andy McCallum's e-mail mining paper from IJCAI-2005, and some of the latest advances in social network analysis and collaborative recommendation.

masaga, who is interested in speech-to-speech translation, is going to contact Kevin Knight for his ACL-2005 paper and his IJCAI-2005 invited talk slides.

Starting next week, we will have a weekly seminar on statistical approaches to machine translation (MT).

I'm looking at GIZA++, the BLEU calculation codes, a short article by Kevin Knight on teaching statistical MT, and his Statistical MT glossary.

CIS 730 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) has about 20 people in it, including several off-campus students - a few more than I expected, but the more, the merrier! As I expected, CIS 732 (Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition) has only 4 people in it (attendance has been: 5 in 1999, 6 in 2001, 5 in 2002, 4 in 2003).

--
Banazir