NLP Seminar

I attended a seminar-workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) yesterday. The following were my thoughts while listening to the speakers:

• Speakers are people from SIL International. White men. Very tall. One has nice blue eyes (but old). They are very good at what they do.
• Introduced to SFM (Standard Format Markup), CC (Consistent Changes) Program, a stream editor, Lexique Pro
• I'm very sleepy, so so sleepy, my eyes are dropping.
• I'm having a nosebleed, especially the linguistics part.
• Long word: antidisestablishmentarianism
• New to my ear: computational linguists vs. ordinary linguists
• NLP is quite interesting but I think it's kinda tedious.
• I know I should be interested in this, after all I have taught Automata Theory and Formal Languages and I know it's not the first time. Unfortunately, I really don't see myself getting into NLP research anytime soon.
• This is like exploring other possible research topics.
• CARLA - Computer-Assisted Related Language Adaptation
• I think that if a computer scientist wants to concentrate on Natural Language Processing, it would really help to study linguistics too, except maybe if he is a native speaker of the language he is concentrating.
  

That constituted half my day yesterday. The other half was mainly battling against a very bad sinusitis attack while giving lectures.