Welcome!
I encourage you to browse around the navigation links at the top of the page. You'll find papers and presentations I've done, but you'll also find a bunch of other resources that may be useful (especially if you're in linguistics). If you have any questions, reach me by e-mail (tylers at stanford).Interface design
My other site, Linguistic Design, assembles more thoughts on user interface design than this one does.
While I don't think the world needs another design philosophy, I do think that a linguistic orientation helps to improve the questions we ask and the designs we create.
People interact with an interface through language (the button labels, the taxonomies, the instructions, the errors, the confirmations, etc), and linguistics is well-suited to tell us how language choices affect intelligibility and desirability.
- Linguistic design
- WordNet, a super-thesaurus
- Bullfighter (to avoid "leverage" and "synergy")
- Good thoughts on readability
- Some basics about language testing
If you're looking for the presentation I gave at Microsoft at the end of July, check here.
For those looking for references and resources for the presentation I gave at the UAWriters conference in Long Beach, check here.
About me
My interests are fairly broad. I'd say the chief ones are: (i) the role of language in human-technology interactions, (ii) documenting/classifying endangered African languages, (iii) sociolinguistic style, and (iv) probabilistic syntax and experimental methodology.
Top picks
Here are some of my papers and presentations that others have liked (or which I have a soft spot for).
- What, if anything, is Shabo related to? (Unclassified, Ethiopia)
- For this, I use phylogenetic methods, here's a how-to for you to use these same methods/software on your languages of interest.
- I also prepared a coding summary for the most genetically stable features in WALS.
- The social meaning of tempo
- What does it mean to be a fast-talker? A slower-talker? Captain James T. Kirk?
- A paper on "Measuring the compositionality of phrasal verbs", including a lengthy appendix to show how to build and evaluate statistical models in R.
- This was the basis of the presentation I gave at QITL-3 in Helsinki on June 2, 2008. You can find the presentation (and its infinite appendices) here.
- An OT analysis of laryngeal harmony in Ndebele/Zulu (Bantu, South Africa).