Category Archives: Varia

May 23, 2013, 12:01 am

Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing

I have stressed that we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP). One thing that might lead you to believe otherwise is that some companies run systems that enable you to hold a conversation with a machine. But that doesn’t involve NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences. It involves automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is very different.

ASR systems deal with words and phrases rather as the song “Rawhide” recommends for cattle: “Don’t try to understand ’em; just rope and throw and brand ’em.”

Labeling noise bursts is the goal, not linguistically based understanding.

Current ASR systems cannot reliably identify arbitrary sentences from continuous speech input. This is partly because such subtle contrasts are involved. The ear of an expert native speaker can detect subtle differences between detect wholly nitrate or holy night rate, but ASR …

May 20, 2013, 12:01 am

Dueling Titles

By Lucy Ferriss

Hundreds of readers opened their New York Times Book Review recently to see a review of a novel that had already been reviewed in April . . . no, wait. That earlier book was Life After Life by the terrific British novelist Kate Atkinson. This book is Life After Life by the terrific American novelist Jill McCorkle. A galumphing typo by the compiler of the table of contents at NYTBR? Nope. There’s the review, glowing about McCorkle’s book much as the reviewer of Atkinson’s book had glowed a mere two weeks earlier.

You cannot copyright a title, and good thing too. Otherwise, the dozen iterations of Forever that have appeared in print in the last two years alone (romance, fantasy, werewolves, YA—name your own genre) would have to resort to the thesaurus for Evermore, Ever and Anon, Till Hell Freezes Over, Semper Eadem. But although McCorkle’s and Atkinson’s publishers are…

May 13, 2013, 12:01 am

Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic

By Geoffrey Pullum

I promised last week that I would discuss three developments that turned almost-useless language-connected technological capabilities into something seriously useful. The one I want to introduce first was introduced by Google toward the end of the 1990s, and it changed our whole lives, largely eliminating the need for having full sentences parsed and translated into database query language.

The hunch that the founders of Google bet on was that simple keyword search could be made vastly more useful by taking the entire set of pages containing all of the list of search words and not just returning it as the result but rather ranking its members by influentiality and showing the most influential first. What a page contains is not the only relevant thing about it: As with any academic publication, who values it and refers to it is also important. And that is (at least to some extent)…

May 9, 2013, 12:01 am

Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing?

By Geoffrey Pullum

Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box:

Which UK papers are not part of the Murdoch empire?

Your results (and you could get identical ones by typing the same words in the reverse order) will contain an estimated two million or more pages about Rupert Murdoch and the newspapers owned by his News Corporation. Exactly what you did not ask for.

Putting quotes round the search string freezes the word order, but makes things worse: It calls not for the answer (which would be a list including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, etc.) but for pages where the exact wording of the question can be found, and there probably aren’t any (except this post).

Machine answering of such a question calls for not just a database of information about newspapers but also natural language processing (NLP). I’ve been…

May 7, 2013, 12:01 am

R.I.P. LOL

By Lucy Ferriss

We may be seeing the death spasms of lol, and few will mourn its passing. Emerging a couple of decades ago as an initialism for laugh[ing] out loud, it suffered misuse through most of its brief life by well-meaning parental units who construed it as lots of love. Since the millennium it has devolved through irony to sarcasm until it arrived, as Katie Hearney at Buzzfeed points out, at meaninglessness.

What’s brought lol into prominence recently is its appearance in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s e-communications, in situations where the supposed meaning of the term renders the accused bomber eerily heartless: Lol those people are cooked and the like. As it turns out, Tsarnaev was most likely referring, not to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, but to members of Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals; and the word cooked here most likely means “crazy” or “high from…

May 6, 2013, 12:01 am

The Comic Stylings of POTUS

By Ben Yagoda

Obama at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “But I kid Mitch McConnell. … “

At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled. According to the official White House transcript (which includes indications of laughter and applause), the president began by telling the crowd at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

How do you like my new entrance music? (Applause.) Rush Limbaugh warned you about this — second term, baby. (Laughter and applause.) We’re changing things around here a little bit. (Laughter.) Actually, my advisers were a little worried about the new rap entrance music. (Laughter.) They are a little more traditional. They suggested that I should start with some jokes at my own expense, just take myself down a peg. I was like, “Guys…

April 24, 2013, 12:01 am

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

By Anne Curzan

In the undergraduate history of English course I am teaching this term, I request/require that the students teach me two new slang words every day before I begin class. I learn some great words this way (e.g., hangry “cranky or angry due to feeling hungry”; adorkable “adorable in a dorky way”). More importantly, the activity reinforces for students a key message of the course: that the history of English is happening all around us (and that slang is humans’ linguistic creativity at work, not linguistic corruption).

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang…

April 22, 2013, 12:01 am

Responding First

By Lucy Ferriss

Once again, with the marathon bombings in Boston, we heard a term that didn’t exist when I was growing up: first responder. The blogosphere hums with disdain for coinages of the last 50 years, so I’d like to take a moment, in the midst of our grief and bewilderment at the bombings themselves, to celebrate this one.

A first responder, as we all vaguely know by now, is someone with a degree of training who arrives first on the scene of a disaster. These people might be medical personnel trained in emergency management, firefighters, law enforcement officers, bodyguards, lifeguards, and so on. In one sense, the term first responder is handy simply because it lumps all these people together and doesn’t rely on initials. But more to the point, it both designates what they really do—respond first—and suggests a level of preparedness that none of the job descriptions otherwise…

April 18, 2013, 12:01 am

Signs of the Times

By Ben Yagoda

Ad from ‘The New Yorker,’ June 6, 1942

The other day, I got a message on Twitter from the writer Ruth Franklin: “Re. New Yorker book, question for you. Do you have a sense of when hotels stopped advertising as ‘restricted’?”

I didn’t know the answer, but I knew what she was referring to. In researching the prolific New Yorker short-story writer Irwin Shaw, for my 2000 book on the magazine, About Town, I’d come upon a story by Shaw, published in the August 17, 1940, issue, called “Selected Clientele.” It was about an assimilated Jewish writer named Sam who experiences an anti-Semitic incident and reflects,

The disease was growing stronger in the veins and organs of America. All the time there were more hotels you couldn’t go to, apartment houses right in New York you couldn’t live in. Sam sold stories to…

April 15, 2013, 12:01 am

Operating Writing

By Lucy Ferriss

When you’re preparing your taxes, you have to get your laughs where you can. I use an online filing tool that has saved my sanity, but it is—like all such programs—one size fits all. When it comes to the income other than my salary, I have picked the category “999999,” which is everything that is not categorizable as food service, freight hauling, and so on, and have described the service for which I am being paid as “writing.” It is, after all, what I do when I’m not teaching, unless you want to list “reading,” which of course figures into the activity in a big way (both reading aloud, as in “giving a reading,” and reading silently, of which the writing is a sort of consequence) but which would probably get me audited.