Disclaimer

Just to be clear, this is really old work. I just happened to find the old draft in my WordPress instance and regenerated the poster.

Genesis

Back in 2009, I had entertained the idea of pretty-printing parts of the SMULTRON treebank onto a large poster for quite some time. While there had always been PDF export in the TreeAligner (well-demonstrated in Marek, T; Lundborg, J; Volk, M (2008)), the code base had technical restrictions that made rendering large amounts of graphs infeasible. With the new Qt backend that was eventually used for the work in Marek, T; Schneider, G; Volk, M (2009), rendering large scenes became feasible; and after wasting a lot of paper, the first version of this poster was presented during the Research Day of the CompSci department of the University of Zürich in September 2009 (the original might still exist, but it is not in my possession), to a largely confused, but well-meaning audience.

Mass Production

The original did not have the nice, dynamically-spaced trees and no colors, logos, legends or URLs. After more iterations, we ended up with the final layout as shown in the PDF, of which ten A0 posters were printed. One poster was given to the Linguistics Department of the University of Konstanz, one to the Department of Corpus Linguistics and Morphology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, on to the Theoretical Computational Linguistics Group in Tübingen, and one poster was presented¹ at TLT8 at the Catholic University of Milano and left there as a gift. Two others were sent to SMULTRON collaborators in Sweden. When I left UZH in the May of 2010, the three leftover posters were still in my old office; I do not know what has become of them.

Tech

The underlying code doing the rendering is still available as part of TreeQuest, which itself never saw a public release and may warrant a post of its own at some point. The rendering is done using Qt4, whose graphics facilities I have in fonder memory than the Cairo API. The actual code for creating the layout has not been publicly released, any requests for it should go to the Department of Computational Linguistics at UZH. The number of graphs being rendered, sizes of graphical elements and line lengths have all been hand-tweaked extensively. There is also an A3 variant available, which has been used as advertisement for MTLA as far as I know.

The treebank data used is version 2.0.1 of SMULTRON. I do not know of any significant changes in version 3.0 that would make it unusable for the script.

1. I still feel bad about this since I cheated my way into the poster session, not having handed it in before, but presenting it anyway at the insistence of the organizers.

Bis dahin also bin ich in Zürich, von der Urbanität her durchaus ein Aufstieg, dafür laufe ich aber deutlich länger als 5 min zum nächsten Karstadt (bzw. der Innenstadt). Das mir nächste Zentrum hat aber neben meinem Arbeitsplatz auch genügend andere Geschäfte zu bieten, sodass sich solche Verluste leichter verschmerzen lassen.

Nach einer dann doch wieder recht hektischen Umzugsphase bin ich seit dem 15. 4. offiziell Assistent an der Universität Zürich (immerhin Nummer 53 im Academic Ranking of World Universities und damit vor allen deutschen Universitäten). Das beinhaltet neben der Lehre (ab dem Herbstsemester) auch Arbeit am TreeAligner) und allem anderen, was mir so einfällt, bisher größtenteils Release-Polishing für die grandiose 1.1, nachdem es eine Version 1.0 nie gab—ein Release-Trick, den sich noch so einige von uns abschauen sollten. Sobald das abgeschlossen ist, dem Plan nach so Mitte Mai, geht es mit voller Kraft auf dem Query-Modul weiter, dazu aber morgen mehr.

The picture contains a 24h clock and shows the number of commits which were done in this hour of the day, scaled by the highest commit count (that being 2 in the afternoon).

What does all this tell us, apart from the fact that I had a free hour today? Well, I never code at 5 or 6 in the morning. For the rest of that, it’s more worthwhile to split the statistics in two parts:

08/2007 – 10/2008, 234 commits

10/2008 – now, 279 commits

Wow, I used to be cool. Hacking late in the evening. Now, it’s just a day job.

The query language in TIGERSearch is limited due to its lack of universal quantification. This restriction makes it impossible to ask simple queries like „Find sentences that do not include a certain word”. We propose an easy way to formulate such queries. We have implemented this extension to the query language in a tool that allows querying parallel treebanks including their alignment constraints. Our implementation of universal quantification relies on the view of node sets rather than single node unification. Our query tool is freely available.

This means that I’ll likely be in Berlin for the conference early October.

I haven’t really managed to do a lot of interesting things for the TreeAligner lately. The query evaluation for complex queries should be a little faster due to a smarter algorithm/data structure, we now have Undo/Redo support (shamelessly copying over all the frameworks from the Eclipse people, only with less code) and the tree renderer is a little faster.

The next step now should be the web-based query server so that interested researchers can try out the query evaluator without having to download the TreeAligner package and going through the hassle of installing GTK+ on Windows.

For those who are wondering what kind of code name Gamla Stan is: STA releases are named after Stockholms subway stations.

Align your trees while the release is still hot!