Educate thy self

Since I've been working in this field for only three years I've had the need to educated myself about my own language. While knowing what a past participle is in real life won't improve your ability to speak or communicate it is important to know what it is when you are trying to teach a comptuer to find important relationships in unstructured documents.

So here are some useful websites that I enjoy and have used to educate myself and as reference:

• Dr. Grammar - a very useful site for improving your understanding of grammar.
  
• Online Writing Support - Towson University's great resource
  
• ESL in Canada - generally any ESL sites are fantastic for adults looking to reducate themselves in English and this one is one of my favorites
  
• Part of Speech Tagging - yeah, gotta have at least one Wikipedia entry. This one is worth going over though!
  
• UPenn Treebank - you are not involved in part of speech tagging and text analytics if you are not familiar with this project. Seriously.
  
• Text Analytics Wiki - this is a new one to my collection. It has promise. Give it a look!
  
• Visuwords - Using the Princeton Wordnet database this is a very visual dictionary/thesaurus. Very useful
  
• LIWC - an interesting peice of software that I am looking at now. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software. LIWC is able to calculate the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts.
  

Well that should get you started. Later on I'll start a blog roll of blogs I think are worthy of merit.