More Thesis Thoughts
Earlier this week, my thesis fell apart when I discovered a research paper that was about my same topic, and it was done so much better than mine. The researcher even used the same corpus! Regardless of how it ruined my life for a minute, Dr. Penny MacDonald's research was well-done and illuminating on several great points that I will cite in my final draft. After panicking for a whole day and talking to my advisor, it's clear that my mistake was in proceeding too close to computational linguistics, which I know practically nothing about. I will still write my research about Native Language Identification, essentially, but most work in the topic has been computational. So I've got to take a different approach. Most of the NLID studies use large corpora of second language-English use and then run algorithms or use machine learning to identify the statistically significant language features that might indicate the authors' first language. These studies are so ...