Ryan Nelson

Linguist | NLP Engineer

About me

In the capacity of a Computational Linguist, my interests primarily lie in vector space, an unanticipated affinity that arose after beginning a project in distributional semantics, which in turn applied directly to my internship project of building a temporal topic model.

My entry into NLP and Computational Linguistics was a return to the domain of Linguistics, long before which I focused on theoretical morphosyntax in the paradigm of Distributed Morphology, with an emphasis on Malagasy.

During an intervening period of three-fifths of one-score years, I worked as some form of data analyst in a variety of industries, in which I found opportunity to learn and apply programming skills to the benefit of my role in those positions. An early such position used VBA and SQL, where I also leveraged R for some projects. In later positions I began moving to Python, a bit of JavaScript in one role, and I held a position at a company where requirements were such that I used SQL and Powershell exclusively.

I have become an ardently zealous user of (Neo)vim.

In a similar spirit, I undertook personal programming projects, including an endeavor to retrieve and parse the content of the concluded webcomic-adjacent art project—with which I have no affiiation—A Softer World. I also developed a project to monitor the well-being and health of my cat by tracking and plotting her weight and her litter box usage in whiskr, written in R.

In the latest two years of this period, my role was nominally that of a database administrator, while much of my work was in creating scripts and utilities to support internal systems.

I then chose to further my development skills within my familiar affinity of Linguistics; thus returned to the University of Arizona in the HLT program, thereby rejoining my new career path with my LInguistics background.

In the capacity of a mass of mushy neurons piloting a skeleton wrapped in meat, I find enjoyment in my cat, philosophy, and the absence of extreme heat.

from absurd import Boulder
class Sisyphus:
    """ Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux """
    def __init__(self, boulder: Boulder):
        self.boulder = boulder
        self._push()
    def _push(self):
        self.boulder.roll()
        self._push()
import antigravity