Category: linguistics
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Norvig says it better
Those who got fired up about Chomsky’s difficult comments regarding empiricism, including myself, will be gratified to see that Peter Norvig, patron saint of data-driven computational linguistics (inter alia), has released his own comments, along the same lines as mine, only better researched, more broadly researched, more respectful, more thorough, and, well, coming from the keyboard…
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Character encodings – a short tutorial
There is a huge profusion of terms around sets of letters, symbols, and characters and how they are encoded onto computers. I found myself embroiled in this mess working at a speech-technology company back in the day as we struggled to adapt a speech recognizer designed for English to cope with Korean — which turns…
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Where’s Jeremy?
Many of you know (or have inferred from my LinkedIn or Twitter updates), but let me point it out explicitly here: I’m working for this summer as a Research Linguist at SRI International, in the same STAR lab that hosted me as a Visiting Fellow while I finished my Ph.D. It’s interesting, diverse work —…
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Chomsky and “walks like a duck” empiricism
Replicated Typo and @jasonbaldridge inter alia have been discussing a recent forum where Chomsky and Minsky and Labov (among others) met to discuss the past and future of artificial intelligence. Replicated Typo points out the most interesting contribution from Chomsky: Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that…
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private key punchlines
Has anybody written about humor as a sign of a successful encryption strategy? I think that a good joke might be a lot like a sweet encryption, and I’d like to explore this notion: The sweet spot of jokes is actually the same as the sweet spot of sweet cryptography schemes. Consider two failed joke…
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broadsheets from the empirical underground
I’ve been corresponding with Zoltán Varjú, an enthusiastic proponent of what he describes as “rationalist” linguistics, and Melody Dye, who I would describe as a strongly “empirical” linguist — or rather, psychologist of language. Also chiming in on that conversation has been Asad Sayeed, an old colleague of mine at the 2005 2003 JHU CLSP…
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Tickets to Embassytown (Miéville)
Annalee Newitz at IO9 has a review of China Miéville’s next upcoming novel, called Embassytown. I want to read this, for the SF and for the linguistic, although I am afraid I’m likely to struggle with suspending disbelief, as I did for the linguisticky bits of Snow Crash.
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IQLA
I’m interested in the International Quantitative Linguistics Association, but they seem fully-embedded in central Europe, and — unlike the Association for Computational Linguistics — they seem to have very few publications available outside a paywall. Anyone have any experience with them?