History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed broken fragments of antique legends.

— Mark Twain

Warren Weaver gave the first introduction to machine translation, claiming that our goal was “erecting a new Tower of Anti-Babel.” He talked about a “mythical” time when people could communicate simply with one another.

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Graham Neubig is incredibly stylish. Or certainly modish.

Lane Schwartz: DLVM (a play on LLVM), a way of compiling your computation graphs.

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Seemingly there’s a consensus that OpenNMT-py is inferior—the same models with the same hyperparameters rather consistently get lower BLEU scores than their counterparts in other toolkits.

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People seem to enjoy toying with things here, but not necessarily going start-to-finish with their projects. I wonder how many hackathon projects have lain fallow.

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Visualizing and understanding how weights change in a neural network is tricky.

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Having a young, engaged, present advisor seems to make a huge difference in people’s productivity. People like Graham or Ben van Durme manage huge groups and the members benefit from each other.

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I had a really good idea for NMT, so I asked Graham about it. Turns out, he did that for EMNLP. Can’t say because it’s during the anonymity period, but it’s comforting to think that I’m asking the right questions.

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The Cathedral of Learning is huge and wonderful. Such a nice view.