Week 10: August 19 - 23
I'm typing this on the final day of my internship, which is hard to believe! I can vividly remember the first day I set foot in Chicago and standing in awe at the sight of Willis Tower from my room. The entire summer went by so fast but when I reflect on what I've accomplished and learned here in this fine city, I am very grateful for the opportunity to experience something like this. I'll return to Gallaudet bragging about what I've done and telling others to give it a shot too! Before this summer, I had no idea what the ACM format meant, nor what it looked like. Now I can almost recite the format from memory, and it is just one of the gazillions of new concepts I learned this summer! I'm Deaf but never really delved into the intricacies of my own language (ASL) and linguistics bored me. Now, after numerous chit-chats with my mentor I've learned a tremendous amount about the linguistic principles behind the team's work. Talking wasn't the only thing I did, ha! I also pored through so many publications that at times my head was spinning with numerous new vocabularies and concepts. It was a pleasant experience to have something like that for my brain to attack other than just sitting at the beach sipping pina coladas :)
This week was not all fun and reminiscencing! I worked day and night to complete my final report and is very happy with how it turned out. It also served as a documentation of sorts on the N-gram work I did over the summer and would be a wonderful paper to accompany my code when I give it to the folks behind ELAN, TLA/MPI. My mentor emailed her friend at the organization and got instructions on how to start the process and I will be getting in touch with Han Sloetjes, the main developer as soon as he returns from his vacation. Darn people vacationing while I'm working, ha! I've also prepared a series of patches to the ELAN code that would make it easier to deliver my version instead of dumping the entire code and making Han's job merging the changes harder. Another thing I will be doing is to deliver the entire website (this page you're reading :) to DREU as part of my final report. They will install it on their servers as a permanent archive of my work. I strongly believe in the open-source ideals and it is nice to know that my work over the summer will not sit on a desk somewhere, helping no-one. I really hope that the folks doing linguistic analyses on ELAN corpora will benefit from my efforts, and I have already seen the improvements in DePaul's avatar over the summer as I collaborated with the team. I look forward to learning more accomplishments the Paula team will do in the future! I wish them the best as I conclude my time with them at DePaul and Chicago...
As per the requirements for DREU, here is the final report for the summer internship: DREU Final Report