While I thought I had overcome my jet lag while I was in Aachen, it came back with a vengeance this week, which prevented me from getting to the office as early as I wanted. Luckily, I’m able to choose my own hours as long as I get my work done, so I made up for it by staying late most times.

Following the research plan I set up last week, I continued my work on my thesis project involving machine transliteration between Tajik Persian and Iranian/Afghan Persian (more info. here!). My current goal is to work on improving my model’s accuracy in time for my talk “Machine Transliteration between two Persian Dialects - The Case of Farsi and Tajiki” that I will be giving at the Tagung der Computerlinguistik-Studierenden (TaCoS), taking place at Heinrich-Heine University from June 29th to July 2nd. This conference takes place at a different university in Germany (or the Netherlands) every year, and is attended by Computational Linguistics students and professors from across the region. I’ll be taking part as one of the twelve student talks. There’s a lot of fascinating work on display that shows the interdisciplinary breadth of Computational Linguistics, with research involving Parkinson’s Disease, Shakespeare, and even language revitalization on display, so I’m quite excited to attend!

To round off the week, I finally visited the main tourist attraction: the Rhein Promenade, and stumbled upon the Düsseldorfer Büchermeile (Düsseldorf Book Mile), a book fair held only three times a year! I spent a couple of hours perusing the many stalls, and ended up going home with some Asterix and Obelix books (my favorite comics growing up), some bilingual short stories to improve my German, the Greek novel “Alexis Sorbas” (in German), and a Dä Bläck Fööss vinyl record (they’re a locally-famous band that sings in the Kölscher (Cologne) variety of Plattdeutsch, a Germanic language separate from standard German).