Recently I took a decision intelligence course. The course laid out the groundwork for making better decisions despite the fallible human nature, including a framework for setting better goals. I order to retain some of it, I decided to use it to set my New Year’s resolution. Let’s go through an example together!

Hello, and welcome to my 2023 reading diary. This year, I wanted to reconnect with reading in a private and intuitive setting while still taking note of what I read. This meant stepping off tracking platforms, and not engaging in overly formal critique like public reviews. I wanted to answer the question: when it is just me and the books, why do I read?

Have you ever attended a Python Pizza event? A unique community event, it is a wonderful opportunity to talk Python and tech industry life skills, see old friends and meet new ones. Recently, the Hamburg edition happened.

How would you model the mental hops that lead from one word to the next? And how about when instead of a word, the starting point are concepts grounded explicitly or implicitly in an image? I gave a talk about a research project I did on this topic at the PyLadies, and celebrated 10 years since my first talk at their events. In this post you can find a short reflection, a recording, slides and all materials from the talk.

Polygloss is a great tool to get you going and start speaking the language you are learning. The idea behind it is to make you kick-start your language production, often the most challenging part of the language learning journey. In this post, we will learn about Polygloss through the example of learning Macedonian.

You have an upcoming Poster Day where you will present your own research for the first time? No worries, I got you! I collected three quick tips that I gathered from the process of creating and presenting my first poster. Perfect to serve as a standing point.

This week I was a guest on the D4 Data podcast. We discussed the basics of what grounding means for language, how children acquire their first language and what does that have to do with how the machines need to learn to understand, why cognitive science and linguistics are important when it comes to natural language processing research, technical tips about working with old research code and so much more.

In this article I will go through the practicals of how to join, the relevant websites (official and digital offer), the mechanisms like borrowing/ordering/recommending books, how to take advantage of the spaces they offer, what the simple act of joining the public library does for access to knowledge for all(and why you should support that) and end with a bonus section for parents and children.

Reproducing studies is a big part of AI program curriculums. If we are lucky enough for the authors to have published some of their code as part of the paper reveal, it can often be very outdated and difficult to run, with a complicated flow or just a blob of undocumented code. Here are five things that can bring immediate change.

I am often the only Macedonian person people have met. The most common question I get is: “what language do people speak there?”. There isn’t much about the language in English and online. For a linguistics course, I got to construct a so called “language profile”, and with it the chance to add a small part of mine out there for others to discover.

How to extend a paper reproduction project with your own experiments, improvements and reflections? I wrote more about our recent experience, what made it enjoyable instead of stressful and how we managed to get meaningful results at the end despite the computational and time constraints.

What is a paper reproduction project, and how to successfully see one through? I go through a recent experience I gathered this semester and discuss what helped the most. Some of these points are rooted in using modern software development practices when dealing with research projects/code.

A small tribute to my mum.

In the essay, I outlined the historical and current research on N400 and P600, their various interpretations, the models of language comprehension that neuroscientists build upon examining their manifestations, and the accompanying neural correlates more newly added to the models.

Walking along the high wall that hides a park on the other side, my son cycling beside me, I suddenly felt grief. That mellow, almost tangible feeling of loss, of longing, of absence. Grief is cold, and comes slowly, freezing the tips of one’s fingers, then their ribs and their thighs. I am no stranger to grief.

As part of a course focusing on psycholinguistics and the neuroscience of language, I wrote a scientific essay on the intersection of language and trauma. Specifically, in the paper, I explore how an unburdened language from one's language repertoire can be a tool for coping with the post-traumatic, in a therapeutical setting or the everyday.

Language learning as a grown up is tough, especially if you have to learn under pressure. It is a great mental leap to internalise a language, and requires constant immersion and input. We often forget that learning must also be fun, otherwise your brain will fight it tooth and nail. As most of us don’t have the priviledge of having someone to listen to and speak with all the time, training our listening skills can be quite a challenge. Podcasts help me tons! I’d like to share a few with you today.

I quit all my absurd rules around books this year and reading came easy and plentiful. Crawled up to 70 books this month. I allowed myself to read just for pleasure and didn’t commit to a book just because I started one - it made all the difference. This was all made possible by the Berlin Public Library and yay for that! Here are some of the best books I read.

My first week of university just ended. The biggest chunk went to our mandatory course called “Advanced Natural Language Processing”. We went through a lot of material around regular expressions and some basic data tools with Python. The most interesting part of my week was the introduction and thinking about “language tasks”. There is very little information if you google the term, so I needed to dig to understand it.

The full title of this gem is “My body, my home: A radical guide to resilience and belonging”. It is written by Victoria Emanuela and Caitlin Metz, the two people behind “On being in your body” project. Their collaborative work focuses on embodiment, on connection with oneself and one’s body and finding one’s unique ways to exist in our complex world. I’d really like to tell you about their little magic workbook.