Do you even parse?

So, for the last few weeks, I've been working on a group project for a conference. The group consists of me, two classmates and our two professors. It's exciting because it's my first time to work on this kind project, unless you count group projects for class. We're working on a "shared task"; there are several of these in my field, and basically they work like this: the host of the task (usually a conference) distributes a set of trial data and gives instructions for participants to process that data into some other form. After teams have adequate time to build a system based on the trial data, the host distributes test data. Then, teams run their systems on the test data and submit their output to the task committee, who will evaluate it and determine a winner. Usually, a few of the highest scoring teams are invited to submit papers describing their system to the conference or journal.

In our task (SemEval 2014 task 5), we have sets of sentences where each is written primarily in language X but with a word or phrase in language Y. The idea is that language X is the writer's L2, and s/he falls back on language Y (the L1) when s/he can't think of the L2 way to say it. The task is to accurately translate those L1 words/phrases into the L2. The L1-L2 pairs in the task are English-Spanish, English-German, French-English and Dutch-English. My part in all of this has been mainly to parse huge amounts of text in these languages, which will be used as training data for other components of our system, which include things like language modeling, mutual intelligence, anaphora (pronoun) resolution, some statistical machine translation methods, etc. The deadline is at the end of this month, so the last two or three weeks I've been spending most of my time on this task.

In other news, I went to see Josh Ritter on Sunday, 2/22. It was at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, which always seems a little sleepy to me, but the performance was good. The coolest part was that I met Josh Ritter that morning. Well, "met". There are a couple of nice brunch spots near the theater, and that morning, I went to meet some friends for brunch. I noticed a tour bus behind the theater when I parked and thought that JR must be in town early. Later, I was sitting with three friends, and my seat was kind of facing a hallway toward the back. Lo and behold, I noticed JR with a man (band member? road crew?) pushing a baby stroller and walking right towards our table from that hallway. My friends weren't familiar with him and I hadn't mentioned that I was seeing the show that night, so they were a little confused when I nudged and pointed excitedly. Anyway, here was my brief convo with Josh Ritter as he walked from the back of the restaurant, around my table and out the front door:
Me: Oh! Josh! Hi! :-)
JR: Um, hi. :-)
Me: Welcome to Bloomington!
JR: Oh, thank you, it's good to be here.
Me: Have a great day! I'll see you at the show!
JR: Great! Thanks, I'll see you there. :-)

It took me a minute to regain my wits and explain it to my friends. :-)

Josh Ritter & friends. Potato quality but you get the idea.

And tomorrow night I'm seeing Arcade Fire! Totally excited for this one. I've seen them once before, but I had mediocre seats and the venue was a hockey arena, so the acoustics were not ideal.