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!