Michael A. Covington > Information for Students

NEW: Suggested thesis topics in NLP. For UGA AI students only (you will have to give your AI Lab username and password).

Academic information

• My schedule
• My teaching in future semesters
• "What Should Grades Mean?" (my grading policy)

• FAQ for people who want to study computational linguistics
• Assistantships that I supervise

Writing papers and theses - General information

• How to write a term paper or thesis (my own preferences and advice)
• Notes about typing mathematical papers
• General requirements for final project papers
• Sample final project paper: LaTeX PDF
  
• Bibliography and citation format guide from UGa Libraries
• Proofreaders' marks (how I mark typing errors)
• Floating figures and tables in Microsoft Word
• Pictures in Your Thesis: Computer graphics literacy for graduate students (NEW)
• Older handout on pictures in your thesis
• My popular presentation, How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly,
  and Learn Complex Material More Easily
• In what sense is "bad grammar" bad?

Writing papers with LaTeX

• What is LaTeX? (PDF document)
  
• Introduction to LaTeX (how to use it!)
• MikTeX:LaTeX for Windows
  (Free software, but it's a big download.)
• LaTeX style sheets for University of Georgia theses (with instructions; no longer officially required; just use any reasonable LaTeX format and add the prescribed title and approval pages at the front)
• FAQ about typing your U.Ga. thesis with LaTeX (PDF)
  
• Wrong paper size with LaTeX (why LaTeX tries to generate output for 11.7-inch A4 paper, and how to fix this)
• PLTeX, a program for presenting Prolog programs elegantly in LaTeX
• LaTeX math symbol chart (Colorado)
• Online LaTeX guides and help (Cambridge University)
  
• Free package for using Adobe fonts with LaTeX, using LY1 encoding for maximum access to special characters
• The Covington LaTeX macros for linguists and documentation
• LaTeX for Linguists (University of Essex)

The R statistical software package

• Download your own copy of R
• Tutorials:
  • Using R to Compare Groups
  • Using R to Detect Changes in Individuals
  • Using R to Find Correlations
  • Files and Recordkeeping With R
  • (Read at least one of the first three; then read the fourth one.)

Linguistics and natural language processing

• ProNTo -- Prolog Natural Language Tools
  (primarily student projects from CSCI/LING 8570)

• Latent Semantic Indexing (a worked example)

• Python resources for linguists who are new to programming
  
• Getting started in Python with IDLE

• Association for Computational Linguistics
• ACL Anthology (published papers about comp. ling.)
• ACL Computational Linguistics Wiki
• Computational Linguistics Universe
• Language (Linguistic Society of America)
• Quantitative Linguistics

• Other Logics (an introduction to nonclassical reasoning)

• Latin pronunciation demystified (PDF)

Prolog and symbolic programming

• Lisp notes and handouts
  
• Prolog notes and handouts
  
• Prolog coding guidelines

Other technical information

• Computer Science Study Keys, a short textbook I wrote in 1990 (PDF)
  
• Example of an image processing program written in C# which does convolutions and other operations as simply as possible.
• Windows for UNIX Users
• What the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio are All About
• Some Visual Studio and C# "Gotchas"
  
• How to Ensure Only One Instance of your C# Program is Running
  
• Some Notes on C# Programming
• Low-level screen and keyboard control for console applications in C#; no longer needed under .NET 2.0, but it was fun to write
• Solving sound card microphone problems (how to interface a standard microphone to a computer sound card that expects an amplified one)
• My personal reference card for the Casio FX-115 MS Plus calculator:
  LaTeX PostScript PDF
• Some microcontroller-related files hosted at UGa
• PIC Assembly Language for the Complete Beginner (tutorial)
• An Atmel AVR notebook (for beginners; includes examples of assembly language, C, and BASIC programming)
• My 1994 notes on the Philips P87C750, my first microcontroller (an 8051 derivative)

• Color Vision and the VGA - Text (PDF) Program
  A magazine article published in PC Techniques in 1990, still of some interest.

• Adding Graphics to Console Applications
  (An easy way to do scientific plotting, etc., in Windows; this is an old article and the technique is not guaranteed to work under current versions, but it has attracted widespread interest and I post it here for its historical value. Please do not ask me for help with it, but if you have helpful information that I can include with it, let me know.)

• Interfacing through the PC joystick port
  (Another obsolete project that I keep getting inquiries about. The circuits are still relevant, but the software is for DOS and would need complete reworking for Windows XP.)

"Remember that your major professor is a busy person. If he isn't, get a different major professor." - Anonymous