Líonra Séimeantach na Gaeilge:
Thanks

Kevin P. Scannell

I am grateful to many many people for their help, support, and inspiration while working on this project. I hope I'm not missing anyone important!

• First, a special dedication to my friend Doğan Koslu. The hardest part about working on this project was the constant feeling that no one would appreciate the hacking that went into it! It definitely reminded me of some of the very-hard-but-ridiculous code we wrote in L.A. back in the day. Knowing that at least one person would take the time to understand what's going on behind the scenes kept me going on several occasions when I was ready to throw in the towel.
• To my St. Louis-based research assistants Madeleine Cáit Scannell (age 8) and Kevin Patrick Scannell, Jr. (age 6). See a photo. At some point last year I explained to them what it was that I was working on, and we talked about examples of ambiguous words. Since then it has become an ongoing parlor game around our house to try to come up with examples of ambiguities that aren't in Daddy's database. Together they've come up with literally hundreds of new senses including many that the researchers at Princeton had missed (e.g. "popup": window, book, or baseball)! I wish my university students were as bright and enthusiastic as you both!
• Gail Scannell did a huge amount of data entry for this project, knowing that I would be unhappy with the results if I paid a disinterested third party to do it. More importantly, thanks for putting up with my late hours, absent-mindedness, and eccentric interests, and for reminding me what's most important (ultimate). You make it all worth it!
• To Luis Henrique Fagundes and the rest of the Morcego team for their amazing network browser, and for supporting free software by releasing it under the LGPL.
• Even though this project was undertaken without any direct financial support, I am grateful to Foras na Gaeilge for their support of my earlier work on grammar checking with Cruinneog. I have worked on developing computational resources for more than 20 minority languages, and Irish may be in the best position, looking forward, of any of them. This is due in large part to the fact that nearly all of the language technology for Irish is freely available. This includes all of my work of course, but also valuable databases like acmhainn.ie and focal.ie upon which I've relied quite heavily, and which were created with support from Foras.
• Thanks to the researchers at the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory for creating the original English WordNet and for making it freely available.
• Also tremendously useful were the synset mappings between versions of the Princeton WordNet produced by the NLP Research Group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
• This project was created using only free software. So thanks to Richard Stallman, Larry Wall, whoever wrote the first version of sed, and thousands of others. Also, it was completed about 300% faster than it would have been otherwise thanks to Bram Moolenaar, the author of vim. Consider giving a donation to help needy children in Uganda in Bram's honor.
• I assign a "working name" to each of my projects before it is released. The LSG was originally dubbed "BLA", for "Battle of Los Angeles", which is the CD I was listening to when I wrote the kernel of the software in late 2006. So thanks, Rage Against the Machine.
• Finally, thanks to the many Irish speakers who have been supportive, in one way or another, of my other projects, especially Diarmaid Mac Mathúna, Séamus Ó Ciardhuáin, Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha, Conn Ó Muineacháin, Vincent Morley, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle (from Skye), Kevin Donnelly (from Wales), Liam Ó Cuinneagáin, Iarla Mac Aodha Bhuí, Brian Ó Broin, Ciarán Ó Duibhín, and Peadar Ó Guilín.