First Blog Post

Welcome to My Blog!

Who am I? Why, I'm just a young, undergraduate, emerging Computational Linguistics professional wanting to get involved in everything NLP. If you weren't able to gather it from the rest of the website (and that's fine!), my name is Lucien, and I use he/him pronouns.

Your next question might be: why on earth am I making a blog? That's because I want to practice my skills in data presentation, talk about problems and my experiences, and who knows? Someone might find it insightful. I'm black, trans, first-gen, and I'm working on getting into tech. Someone's bound to have these same experiences.

What better time to start a blog than during COVID?

I enjoy transparency, and to be quite frank, it's hard to navigate the tech sphere and break-in. I want to create a diverse space. I kind of can't help it, as it is. I'll definitely have a range of projects, but I'm really aiming to have projects that focus on my interests and lived experiences with my queerness, my blackness, my neurodivergency, and many more.

At the end of the day, I want to get to a place where I can mentor people like me or similar. So, while this post won't pick up, if you read this from now to, oh, let's say, five years from now, it'll definitely be a journey of growth.

My main interests within NLP is in regards to underrepresented languages in tech, namely Twi. This is the language that I'm receptively bilingual in and in the language that drove my passion for Computational Linguistics. If you look on Google Translate, you'll see that the language is definitely not there. But there's a group, GhanaNLP, that's working to change this. I'm hoping that my experiences with this open-source project can change tech to value these languages, even if it's not profitable. But I'm not a business person (yet), and perhaps there will be a way to increase representation. Only time will tell.

Additionally, as a linguistics major, I'm fascinated with language change, especially how it happens in social media. There's a lot of room for exploration, so this is a budding topic on combining linguistics and data science to observe these trends. Stay tuned for some work regarding this from me!

So, with that, thanks for reading! I'll see y'all on the flip side.