What do you do?

As a grad student working on NLP how do you explain what you are working on, to friends and family? I inevitably end up referring to the Google search engine even though what I do is quite far from IR. Actually, thats not true. These days IR seems to consume everything but thats another story.

This reminds me of a funny conversation at CLSP recently:

Sanjeev is telling us about an incident where a concerned parent of a young child with a speaking disability is asking him for his opinion. Apparently, she is confused about "Language and Speech Processing" in CLSP.

Keith butts in: "Run a few more iterations of EM and he'll be fine."

A song on parsing

We all know Jason's love for parsing from his work but it takes a different level of dedication to write a Valentine's Day song about parsing.

As Jason says, "Parsers just want to be appreciated, like everyone else."