Christine Phan joins as Cesta RA

Christine Phan, majoring in Computer Science, joined the Grand Tour Project as CESTA RA, with an interest in contributing to the project while putting to test her growing skills in natural language processing. Her task was to parse the narrative paragraphs that describe travelers’ journeys in order to translate into data the personal names contained in them. Over winter and spring 2017, she identified within CoreNLP (the toolkit developed by the Stanford Natural Language Group and available at https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/) the appropriate tool to use, and applied it to the Grand Tour Project database to produce the first version of ‘mentioned names’ .