Interview memoid

[trochee]

elmofromok asked me the following questions:
1. What's the hardest thing about teaching computers to understand language?
The hardest thing has to be finding enough examples. Humans learn language by being exposed to it every day, for hours at a time. Most of the contemporary natural language processing/understanding systems right now work by being exposed to very large corpora (bodies of text) and letting the machines chew through this information to extract statistical measures of the language. With good algorithms -- and there are many -- and enough data (there's not nearly enough) lots of problems come within the range of tractability. But for most languages -- even English, for some kinds of problems -- there aren't nearly enough examples to make the work easy. This is especially true when dealing with non-web kinds of language.
2. What turns you on (intellectually, emotionally, sexually, you pick) and what can you do to have that in your life?
I'll fink out and pick the middle road here and go with emotionally -- if I pick intellectually I tip my grad school/perpetual student hand too much, and sexually --hell, I don't even know, and I need to think about it too much to do this on a holiday after three glasses of wine.
Emotionally, I'm really turned on by the combination of trust and directness. I can find it a little overwhelming, but when I find friends or lovers who can share what they're thinking with me, without fear of what I'll say back -- and when the reverse is true, though it's not always so important -- I get the rush of "I really care about this person, and [s]he loves and cares about me back". I suppose that part of the emotional attraction there is a desire to take care of people, and to know that I'm trusted. For some people, I guess this could be a neurosis -- a need to be needed, maybe -- but for me it feels like an affirmation of my own humanity, a mark of respect for me as a decent and trustworthy person. I've had that rush with more than one person in my life, and it's a nice feeling; connected.
To get this feeling more in my life -- I think I'm already doing it. I'm trying to retain the human connections in my life; the biggest challenge for me is to remember that my academic slavedriver is myself, and I need to make time for the people in my life with whom I share that level of trust -- some of whom are livejournal friends, some of whom I've talked into becoming livejournal friends, and some of whom are people I only interact with IRL. Making time to have love and be loved.
3. Explain your lj name.
trochee is an old-fashioned (very old fashioned!) linguistics term (who's surprised, raise your hand. I didn't think so). It describes a two-syllable metrical foot with a strong syllable followed by a short one (like "tiger" or "chicken" but not like "revert"). It is pronounced /'ʧɹəʊ,ki/ to rhyme with "croaky". Apparently, according to the OED, this word is also sometimes an alternate spelling for "troche", which is pronounced /ʧɹəʊʃ/ and means "A flat round tablet or lozenge, made of some medicinal substance powdered, worked into a paste with mucilage or the like, and dried". I think I prefer the first, which was what I was referring to.
I was seeking a handle that was unlikely to be taken on livejournal, so I figured that obscure terms from philology would be felicitous, since they're distinctive, yet real words, with nice meanings. I would have taken iamb or dactyl but they were already taken. (dactyl would have been my first choice, since it describes my IRL name and also means "finger" which is just fun. But it was taken, so trochee it is.)
As it is, I have grown to love the name -- it's difficult to know how to pronounce, but in a medium like weblogging, this doesn't matter.
If you want me to interview you--post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post.

At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, ask if any of your friends want to be interviewed.

Comments

[elmofromok.livejournal.com]

thanks!

[cat-whisperer.livejournal.com]

Those were interesting to read! I'll play. :)

[la-chispa.livejournal.com]

and sexually --hell, I don't even know, and I need to think about it too much to do this on a holiday after three glasses of wine.

That's unspeakably cute.

[chachachana.livejournal.com]

thanks for sharing, j. i want to play but i need more time to think of questions! you can ask me 3 if you want~

belated but

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I'll play.