The Lousy Linguist

my annual SOTU & word clouds rant

2012-01-24T22:53:00.003-05:00

Good to revisit: word clouds are the Fox News of linguistics (see here and here)

CompuPolitics or Wonkonomics?

2012-01-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

Philip Resnik, computational linguist extraordinaire, has requested name candidates for a “new domain of activity” he described recently in a Language Log post.

But naming is not easy. It’s fun to mock bad names like Netflix’s dud Qwikster, but try coming up with a better one. Go on. I’ll wait …

Yeah, see. Not easy.

Money quote:
“…people are starting to suggest that volume and sentiment analysis on tweets … might produce useful information about people's viewpoints, or even predict the success of political campaigns. Indeed, it's been suggested that numbers derived from Twitter traffic might be better than polls, or at least better than pundits.”

So, what to call this pursuit? Resnik suggests CompuPolitics. But, I mean, really? It’s so 90s. Evoking CompuServe. It’s dead... stale... dry. The stench of moth-infested dust permeates my nostrils just reading it.

Resnik gave it a shot. He misfired, but I respect the effort. So what are we looking for in a name? An analogy could be drawn with Culturomics, the Google Ngrams inspired NLP endeavor. But let's be honest, that's a gawd-awful name reeking of middle-aged literary professors amazed that Eliza talks back. Rather, a better analogy might be Freakonomics, one of the best academic coinages of the last few decades (maybe ever). It has captured the spirit of its practitioners in a way that is immediately obvious to the lay person*.

But just what is Resnik trying to name? His Language Log post seems to be referencing a new field of academic pursuit, like behavioral economics or bioinformatics. But it’s also deeply embedded in industry practices which evoke terms like big data and text analytics Again, this suggests that Freakonomics is indeed an apt analogy as it refers not just to the style of analysis, but also a for-profit business model involving books, a NYT blog, and now a movie.

Let’s assume Resnik’s goal is to find a name for a business-savvy methodology. Let us recognize that many academic field names that we currently take as meaningful evocations of deep thinking actually have ridiculous names (the prevalence of Latin and Greek terms and blends alone should make us all giggle).

Philosophy – blend of Greek philo- "loving" and sophia "knowledge” (‘love-knowledge’?? I mean, how stupid is that…)
Biology – blend of Greek bios "life" and –logia “to speak” (what? ‘life speaks’? huh? ‘the talking life’? dumb dumb dumb)
English – I mean, frik, really? Is this a real academic department? Next, you’ll tell me there’s a real Department of French and Romance Philology.

To coin a new term, we want some understanding of the themes we want the new term to evoke. Here’s a stab at what I think Resnik is looking for:

Technical Themes:

Computational (oooh, “science”)
Political (ugh, windbags)
New (oooh, shiny)
Search/discovery (ya mean like the googles?)

Emotional Themes:

Pulse of opinion (I care about what other people care about)
Gravitas (really smart people care about this)
Better than polls or pundits (I hate them anyway, now I know why)
Value (who doesn’t love a bargain)
Honesty (fake tweets and Twitter-bots are not my friends)

Big Picture Themes:

Rising above the noise (Needle? Check. Haystack? Check.)
Making a difference (like Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me)
Finding the truth (“the truth is out there”)
This is the future, and it’s good (like Justin Beiber?)

Now, to find a single word or phrase that captures all of that at once… hmmmm. Here's a half hearted attempt:

Name Candidates

Literal (typically the most clunky, clumsy, and goofy, worth avoiding)

CompuPolitics – blend of computer and politics
SentiMent – riff on one word sentiment
Sentics – blend of sentiment and politics
Poliments – blend of politics and sentiment
PoliTude – blend of politics and attitude
Crowditude – blend of crowd and attitude
PoliInformatics – blend of politics and informatics ala bioinformatics

Associative

Flutter – ala “Twitter”, this evokes temporary changes in sentiment captured by the technology.
CanaryStats – evokes canary in coal mine analogy
Wonkonomics - Fun, professional, evokes both George Stephanopoulos and Willy Wonka in the same breath

Homage

Freakoment - blend of Freakonomics and sentiment (I mean, fuck it, those guys are making bank, right?)
Groupthink – a little creepy, but ya know, Orwell knew language…

Clearly, I favor the awesomely evocative Wonkonomics. But you be the judge...

* Let us put aside the inevitable debate over whether or not Freakonomics is good science. It’s a great name.

the incoherent accents of Hugo

2011-11-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

Saw Hugo. It's more for big kids than little ones, imho. I enjoyed it and found its retro-whimsy entertaining, but the 3D is frustrating for someone who wears prescription glasses. It has a talented cast of veteran British actors who don't get nearly enough screen time (Kingsley may get a best supporting actor nod come Oscar time). Also, I'm an unabashed Chloë Moretz fan, and she is every bit as good in this film as I expected. She is one of the best teen actors in history and she keeps getting better. She has the facial expressiveness of Brando, and I don't say that lightly. Unfortunately, the film rests on the performance of its lead, Asa Butterfield, who is, sorry to say, flat and unconvincing as the orphan genius tinkerer Hugo. Partly this is because his dialogue is awful and clunky. No one talks that way, especially not a scared orphan. He also lack the facial expressiveness of Moretz but is in constant juxtaposition with her, so he pales even the greater in comparison.

For a little linguistic aside (since this is The Lousy Linguist, not The Lousy Film Critic), the film is set in Paris, but everyone has an English accent, including the Atlanta born American actress Moretz. Rumor has it she auditioned for Scorsese with the accent and he didn't know she was American (though I find this hard to believe since she has been a well known actress for several years now).

Moretz did an acceptable job affecting the British accent, as far as I could tell, though I'm not that good at spotting phonies unless they're really bad. I did detect the occasional break, though. More to the point, why is everyone speaking with a British accent in Paris!!!

Accents in movies are a storyteller's way to set the mood, so to speak. I find it to be one of the most incoherent, yet successful, tricks in the movie biz. When Hollywood makes a movie about WW2, the Nazi's all have German accents.

But here's the linguistically incoherent part. Back then, during WW2, when Nazis spoke to each other ... they didn't have accents! Not to each others' ears. When French people speak to each other in French, they don't sound foreign to each other. They sound like native speakers. Yet, Hollywood (and other film markets too, I'm sure) has decided that "sounding foreign" sets the mood for a film set in a foreign land. Even more incoherent is when film makers think they are being more "authentic" by having actors speak in foreign accents, when, linguistically speaking, this is about as INauthentic as you can get. When native speakers of any language speak to each other, they don't sound foreign. Yet, when audiences watch films set in foreign lands, the key to making the audience feel the sense of authenticity, is to make the actors sound foreign. Cognitive dissonance anyone?

Perry's tip-of-the-tongue flubb

2011-11-11T09:53:00.001-05:00

Much virtual ink is being spilled/spilt about US Presidential candidate Rick Perry's tip-of-the-tongue gaff at Wednesday night's GOP debate. His inability to remember a third government department he would cut is being decried as the ultimate end of his candidacy. This may be the case, I honestly don't know. But I think the linguists of the world should point out that tip-of-the-tongue speech errors are universal and say nothing about a person's intelligence or even their preparedness. They are entirely a function of neuro-biological processes which we all encounter. Luckily one (and as far as I can tell right now, only one) journalist bothered to follow up on The Science Behind Rick Perry’s Debate Brain Freeze. Money quote:

When the brain juggles a reasonable quantity of information and tries to make sense of it—as Perry was presumably trying to do as he channeled what he knew, and began to answer CNBC moderator Maria Bartiromo’s question—activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, increases: this is the circuitry that handles decision making and emotional control.

But as you attempt to tap into more and more information, as Perry was presumably trying to do (imagine him desperately going down the list of cabinet departments and other federal agencies trying to come up with the third one on his hit list), activity in the dorsolateral PFC drops like a stone. It’s as if a circuit breaker pops as a result of “cognitive and information overload,” Angelika Dimoka of Temple University told me for a recent story.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Calling all Brits stuck in the colonies...

2011-11-03T21:23:00.000-04:00

The Economist's Johnson blog wants Brits living in the US to take a dialect survey.

One of the set-piece conversations that Britons living in America have with each other, besides how cold it is, how hot it is, or how interesting it is that people here don't talk about the weather all the time, is about which British words or pronunciations they have shed in favour of their American equivalents...If you're a Brit living in the United States, please take a minute (no longer) to fill out this web form. Just put in how long you've lived in the United States, and mark which Americanisms you use. I'll post the results in a few days..

The survey, in case you missed it, is here.

So, you want a real job?

2011-10-31T16:18:00.005-04:00

My guest post about the job market for linguistics outside academia at Zoltan Varju's blog is available here.

no one is scared of Johnny Depp (a film review)

2011-10-28T22:45:00.000-04:00

I just saw The Rum Diary starring Johnny Depp. I enjoyed this film a lot. It is well paced, fun, beautiful, caustic, and funny ...yet... Depp just never seemed right as Thompson (thinly veiled as Paul Kemp, Puerto Rico journalist in the early 1960s).

Before critiquing Depp, let me run through a few non-Depp related points:

I can recommend this film without hesitation as unquestionably worth your time and money. Go see this film. This film is better than 95% of the films that have come out in the last 20 years. I'm not joking, Go see this film.

Brilliant dialogue: Kudos to writer/direct Bruce Robinson for allowing Thompson's witty yet brutally incisive social critiques to highlight the dialogue. This is a beautifully rendered script. It was an honor to listen to characters say interesting things again after decades of trite piffle littering our movie screens. This is the best screenplay since 2009's An Education.

Giovanni Ribisi is fantastic as the weird, drunk, Hitler-loving Moburg. His performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Amber Heard is visually stunning, but she is rarely given more than 6 words to say at a time (same is true for her performance in Pineapple Express). With so few lines, it's not clear if she is a bad actor or if no one will give her the chance to act. I couldn't help but be reminded of Scarlett Johansson, who is truly beautiful, but is an utterly cringe-worthy actor (only Sofia Coppola has managed to wring a competent performance out of her).

That said...

I am a Johnny Depp fan. I like most of his films. I have known Depp to be a Thompson devotee for some time, but only this week learned he actually lived with Thompson for a couple years in the early 1990s (if I read this correctly).

But! Depp has something of the vaudevillian in him. A knowing performer, deft at character, but always with a nod to the audience about the façade, the game, a wink to their suspension of disbelief. Enjoy the show folks, glad you could spare some time for my little charade. It is precisely this man-behind-the-curtain nod that troubled me throughout the film. I had a similar response to Depp's turn as Thompson in the 1998 film, but I couldn't quite put it to words.

I grew up in a family of Hunter Thompson fans. My three older brothers lived Thompson-esque lives (complete with hilarious, madcap drug addled stories, but also to horrible ends in one case). I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was 12 and loved it. I read everything Thompson I could find. My dad once found about 30 old Rolling Stone magazines at a yard sell for like $2 and bought the lot and they were filled with Thompson articles. I read them all. I read Hell Angels, The Great Shark Hunt. Hell, I even read The Curse of Lono. Like all Thompson fans, I knew of the existence of The Rum Diary, his first novel written in the 1960s but not published until the late 1990s, and I yearned for the chance to read the unpublished manuscript. When it finally did get published, I jumped at it. Some of you line up for Harry Potter movies, I lined up for The Rum Diaries.

So, I respect Johnny Depp's talent and sincerity and I defer to the fact that he actually knew the man quite well (and I didn't); nonetheless, Hunter S. Thompson played a remarkably important role in my formative years and I feel that entitles me to a certain level of critique (I could be wrong about that...entitlements are typically bullshit ... but this is my bullshit).

And my critique is this: Johnny Depp lacks authenticity. I cannot buy him as Thompson. At least, I cannot buy him as the embodiment of my conception of Thompson. Depp is fun, quirky, smarmy, but always superficial. Thompson is dangerously loose, and frighteningly deep. Depp is never dangerous because his knowing smirk lets us know it's just a game. Thompson never lets us off the hook this way. You may question the truth of Thompson's claims secretly, in your heart, but Thompson never lets you question him to his face, you wouldn't dare. You'd be too scared. But no one is scared of Johnny Depp. He's a kid playing dress up.

This is not a losing battle. Bill Murray's 1980 performance as Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam is dead on. Murray nails Thompson's duality of hilarious and dangerous, fun and scary, fake and real. Johnny Depp nails the hilarious, fun, fake parts, but fails at the dangerous, scary, real parts. No duality. Perhaps my early, formative exposure to that 1980 film has poisoned me to all others. Maybe.

Regardless, I end with my opening plea: Go see this film. You will be happy you did.

Stanford professors and grammatical illusions

2011-08-13T12:22:00.003-04:00

I started reading The Origins of Political Order by Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama when I stumbled across this sentence:

But it is clear that the political job of finding the right regulatory mechanisms to tame capitalism's volatility have not yet been found.

I read it a second time. Then a third. It just didn't seem right. The verb "have" is wrong, right? It should be "has", I think. But it was difficult to see why until I broke the sentence down to its essential elements. The linguistic dependencies are obscured by multiple embedded PPs, in this case, making it difficult to get the agreement right.

Distilling a complex sentence down to its essential elements is a technique I taught to students for years because it helps us see what the sentence "means" in a basic sense, and all we need is our intuition. No linguistic theory or technical terms are required. One way to do begin is to simply replace noun phrases with variables like X and Y:

But it is clear that the X of finding the right Y to tame Z have not yet been found.

Already we see that "have" sounds more clearly wrong. Next we can delete the introductory phrase "But..."

The X of finding the right Y to tame Z have not yet been found.

Now we have distilled the sentence to its basic elements. To figure out why "have" sounds wrong, we can delete all prepositional phrases, as they are not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence:

The X have not yet been found.

Finally, we need only put the original X phrase back in:

The political job have not yet been found.

Using just our intuition, two things should be obvious:

The subject "political job" is singular and requires the verb to be "has" (syntax).
It is odd to speak about finding a political job (when it clearly does not mean job in the sense of getting paid to do something). Rather, this is referring to political will (semantics).

A little analysis of the original and we can guess that Fukuyama was probably trying to construct a linguistic dependency between "have" and "regulatory mechanisms." But this dependency is ungrammatical in the strict sense that "regulatory mechanisms" is not the subject of the sentence. Yet the sentence is not obviously ungrammatical (like "Bob feet have."). I taught 18 year old public school freshmen about this, but we can see that this kind of thing gets the best of even highly educated, accomplished Stanford professors. It is a function of how our brains construct and parse sentences.

This sentence presents what Colin Phillips has called a grammatical illusion. He explains them thusly:

Research on the online implementation of grammatical constraints reveals a strikingly uneven profile. The parser shows impressive accuracy in the application of some rather complex constraints, but makes many errors in the implementation of some relatively simple constraints.

His plenary talk at LSA 2010 provided a variety of examples (many involving "have", curiously enough). Here's a pre-print PDF of his work on the topic:

Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. Colin Phillips, Matt Wagers, & Ellen Lau. 26pp. June 2009. To appear in Language and Linguistics Compass.

"the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself"

2011-07-08T07:33:00.002-04:00

One of the metaphor recognition papers I read this week had an interesting finding wrt inter-annotator agreement and metaphor: The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-based Analysis (Babarczy et a., LREC 2010 Workshop).

The purpose of the paper was to run a sort-of bake-off between three methods of creating source/target word lists (to be used by selection preference metaphor recognition system): Three different methods of compiling the word lists were tested: a) word association experiment, b) dictionary of synonyms, and c) reference corpus.

Ultimately they found that their corpus based method was most successful as measured by recall/precision, but there was a more striking result rather buried in the paper that I feel deserves more analysis. They created a gold standard by hand-tagging a 30,000 word "baseline" corpus. Here's what they found:

At the first attempt, inter-annotator agreement was only 17%. After refining the annotation instructions, we made a second attempt, which resulted in an agreement level of 48%, which is still a strikingly low value. These results indicate that the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself [emphasis added].

They reported three general sources of inter-annotator DISagreement:

Direct vs. Indirect Reference: For example, in the case of the conceptual metaphors ANGER IS HEAT or CONFLICT IS FIRE, the source domain should be an expression referring to a sort of “heated thing”. However, in some cases, one or the other annotator included words indirectly suggesting the presence of heat, such as kiolt ('extinguish'), kihől ( 'get cold') etc.

Lexical Ambiguity: For example, the expression eljutottam a mai napig ('I've gotten to this day') may or may not represent a CHANGE IS MOTION metaphor depending on whether the Hungarian verb jut (literally: get somewhere, reach a place by moving the entire body) is taken only to denote physical movement or to be ambiguous.

Discrepancies in Classification: ...it is difficult to make an informed decision on whether the following example contains a CHANGE IS MOTION or a PROGRESS IS MOTION FORWARD metaphor, neither of which appear to be an intuitively correct choice: a járvány végigsöpört szülıvárosukon ('the epidemic swept through their hometown').

Of the four or five articles I've reviewed on automatic metaphor identification, this is the only one which reported on the results of human-tagging a corpus for metaphor. This strikes me as the sort of thing that should be a first step for anyone seriously interested in this program (certainly anyone interested in the IARPA Metaphor Program).I don't doubt that others have done this, but it seems to be under-reported, suggesting it is not be treated as a core part of the problem.

I've complained in my previous posts that there is an overly restricted definition of metaphor underlying contemporary approaches to auto identification, but even within a highly restricted definition like those used by Babarczy et al. and others, there appears to be problems at the heart of identification for humans. So what exactly is being identified?

Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M., István Fekete, & Eszter Simon (2010). The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis LREC 2010 Workshop. Proceedings

more on auto metaphor recognition methods

2011-07-07T07:33:00.012-04:00

A quick follow-up to my previous post on automatic metaphor recognition wrt the IARPA Metaphor Program. The paper Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns by Tang et al. challenges the dominant selectional preferences method by substituing their own Semantic Relations Patterns. They point out the problems with Selection Preferences (unfortunately I don't think they solved the problems with their own method, more on that in a bit).

Again I'll give the Ling 101, computational linguistics for dummies version (as I understand it ...): Selection Preferences assumes that words frequently co-occur with other words that are literally associated with the same semantic domain. For example,

That ship has sailed the mighty ocean.
That boat has sailed across lake Erie.
That captain has sailed many seas.

In these three sentences, the verb sailed occurs with three different subjects (ship, boat, captain) and three different objects (ocean, lake, seas), but all of them evoke the SAILING domain. So a computer could use this info to create a model of the verb sail that would match up the semantics of its expected subjects and objects, then compare them to a new sentence. If the computer encountered the new sentence

4. That student sailed through final exams.

It could automatically use the model created from sentences 1-3 above to recognize that the verb sailed occurs with a subject and object not from the SAILING domain, but rather from the STUDENT domain. Then it could use a metaphor mapping component to recognize that HUMANS as MACHINES is an acceptable mapping and thus recognize that #4 might be coherent under a metaphorical interpretation.

Tang et al. rightly point out that matching frequency-based selectional preferences is not the same thing as literal meaning. First, they note that some times, a metaphorical pairing is actually MORE FREQUENT than a litertal pairing. They use some Chinese examples, but I think the English translation makes the point. Take the following two uses of close:

The plane is close to the tower.
Opinion are close.

In their corpus, Chinese uses like 'opinions are close' were more frequent, even though this is a non-literal use of close. Frequency would lead the Selectional Preference method to believe that the opinions-type use is literal simply because it is more frequent. This outcome is predicted by Lakoff & Johnson, btw, because one of the core tenants of their seminal work on metaphors was that metaphors are NOT special uses of language, but rather quite common and normal.

Tang et al.'s solution is a new method they call Semantic Relation Patterns. Their explanation is brief and highly technical, making it a slog to get through, but it hinges on incorporating an existing semantic relations knowledge base, HowNet, and adding a probabalistic model. Note, I had trouble getting the HowNet website to load, but here is a PDF explanation.

How Net is an on-line common-sense knowledge base unveiling inter-conceptual relations and inter-attribute relations of concepts as connoting in Chinese and English bilingual lexicons.

In my quick read the two methods differed only minimally in the crucial ways (namely, they are both lexalist and local). Semantic Relation patterns are still based on lexical semantics and still derived entirely locally. I don't see how SRP would handle this metaphor from my earlier post any better than SP:

Imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:

Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?
Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.

In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent and literal from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).

I appreciate Tang et al.'s critique of the SP method and their attempt to get beyond it, but I think their methodology fails to make the critical improvements to automatic metaphor recognition that will be crucial to creating a full scale tool that handles real world metaphor.

Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language Processing

the big picture: automatic metaphor identification

2011-07-05T09:49:00.000-04:00

The recently popularized IARPA Metaphor Program piqued my curiosity, so I've been reviewing a variety of articles on contemporary approaches to automatic metaphor identification. I've read three articles so far and one thing is somewhat dissapointing: they all severely restrict the notion of metaphor to mean local metaphors within single sentences.

They all pay considerable lip service to Lakoff & Johnson's seminal 1980 work Metaphors We Live By, taking as gospel the notion that metaphor is defined as a mapping from one conceptual domain to another. But their examples are all of a limited type. Here are three representative examples from the papers I've been reading:

Achilles was a lion. (Babarczy et al.)
The sky is sad. (Tang et al.)
I attacked his arguments (Baumer)

What struck me is the methods used to identify metaphor are remarkably lexalist. The dominant strategy is Selectional Preferences whereby a list of source and target conceptual domains is created. Then from each, a list of words typically associated with that domain is culled from corpora or intuition or dictionaries. Then, each word is given a set of selectional preferences which constrain what kinds of subjects or predicates it typically occurs with.

Here is my Ling 101 version of this methodology: If I understand correctly (and I may not), for Tang et al.'s example "The sky is sad", we would have a concept like THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN. We would have a list of words typically associated with the environment (e.g., "sky") and a list of words typically associated with being human (for example "sad"). A computer could then recognize the following:

The subject (the sky) is associated with the environment.
The predicate (sad) is associated with humans.
This subject (the sky) is not typical for this predicate (sad).
This sentence is incoherent on first analysis.
The concept THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN links these non-typical phrases coherently.
This sentence is only coherent using conceptual mapping, therefore it is probably metaphorical.

This is a gross oversimplification, but I think it gets the big picture about right.

At first blush, I'm impressed with the simplicity and elegance of this solution. However, it seems to me that much metaphorical language is not local like this (local here = within a single sentence). For example, imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:

Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?
Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.

In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).

Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language Processing

Other citations:
The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A
Corpus-Based Analysis. Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M.1, István Fekete1, Eszter Simon1

Computational Metaphor Identification to Foster Critical Thinking and Creativity. ERIC BAUMER (dissertation). 2009.

the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters)

2011-07-01T08:33:00.000-04:00

Let me take the ball Mark Liberman threw on Monday and run with it a bit. Liberman posted a thorough discussion of Fausey and Broditsky's neo-Whorfian English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently. Specifically, he invited readers to carefully examine the methodology of the experiments themselves, and not just focus on the conclusions. It turns out that a few years ago another set of neo-Whorfians, Jürgen Bohnemeyer and company, published a paper that addressed similar methodological concerns:

Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events. (With S. Eisenbeiss and B. Narasimhan) Colchester: University of Essex, Department of Language and Linguistics (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 50: 1-19). 2006.

This paper addressed experiments involving motion events like rolling and falling whereas Fausey and Broditsky's work addressed agentivity like breaking and popping, but there's enough overlap to warrant some comparison, particularly since the Bohnemeyer et al. paper specifically addresses methodology wrt Whorfian experiments.

But before I get into the details, let me state clearly why I think this is important. In other posts, I have dismissed popular lingo-topics like language evolution as outside the mainstream of linguistics because they don't bear directly on what I consider to be the center of the linguistics universe: How the brain does language. But linguistic relativity (aka, The Whorfian hypothesis) is one of the great questions of linguistics and cognitive science precisely because it bears directly on the question of how the brain does language. And we're only just now developing the proper tools and methodologies to study the question with scientific rigor. It may turn out that language does not affect other cognitive processes or the effect is minor. I don't care. I just want to know one way or the other. And it's work like Bohnemeyer's and Broditsky's that will lead us to knowing, eventually.

Now the fun stuff.

Bohnemeyer et al. start with an assumption about language types based on Talmy's cognitive semantics typology that classes languages as either satellite-framing or verb-framing, From Talmy:

...languages fall into two main types on the basis of where the Path is represented in a sentence expressing a Motion event [...]. In this two-category typology, if the Path is characteristically represented in the main verb or verb root of a sentence, the language is "verb framed", but if it is characteristically represented in the satellite and/or preposition, the language is "satellite framed".

In this typology, English is a satellite-frame language and Spanish is a verb-frame language. Bohnemeyer et al. conclude that “verb-framed” (V) languages lexicalize path information in the verb root. Consequently, they require a separate expression for the “manner” of the motion event [...] The additional syntactic position renders manner in V–languages less “codable”. Consequently, manner is encoded more routinely in S–language discourse. Thus, the question arises whether S–language native speakers also pay more attention to manner when committing a motion event to memory and/or comparing it to other events." (emphasis added).

So satellite-frame languages like English push path info into separate phrases and verb-frame languages like Spanish push manner into separate phrases. Take the following English sentences:

The ball rolled down the hill.
The ball bounced down the hill.

In English, the manner of motion (rolling vs. bouncing) is encoded on the verb (i.e., different verbs), but the path is encoded as a separate phrase ("down the hill") as opposed to something like this:

The ball moved down the hill rollingly.

Here the verb move is fairly simple and encodes no manner info by itself. As a note, Talmy's typology is based on colloquial and high frequency language use. Many languages allow both kinds of constructions, it's just that one is highly frequent in "everyday" speech.

And there's the crux of Bohnemeyer et al.'s experiments. But, they also noticed conflicting results in several other neo-Whorfian studies that they believed were a result of methodology so they set out to investigate methodology. Those other papers used a similarity-judgement task, so Bohememeyer et al. used that task as well. Particularly, they gave particpants a series of three short animated videos to watch. For example, one video was a tomato rolling down a hill. Their methodology is difficult to understand if you just read through, so I'm going to try to help with some bold-facing and re-structuring of paragraphs and a few re-wordings. What follows is a near-quote:

...we conducted a similarity-judgment task analogous in design to those reviewed above with native speakers of 17 genetically and typologically diverse languages – to our knowledge, the largest sample of languages ever used in a Whorfian study. To control for the effects of individual manner or path contrasts, we cross-classified six path types with four manner types, realizing all possible combinations in our stimulus set and counterbalancing for frequency of occurrence.

[... FYI, the 17 languages were Basque, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Jalonke, Japanese, Lao, Polish, Spanish, Tamil, Tidore, Tiriyó, Turkish, and Yukatek]

The materials consisted of 72 triads (i.e., 72 sets of three videos). The targets (i.e., main videos) were 24 motion-event video-animations which systematically varied:

four manners of motion (SPIN, ROLL, BOUNCE, SLIDE),
three scenarios with different “ground” objects (inclined ramp; field with tree and rock; field with hut and cave), and
two directed paths (motion UP/RIGHT, DOWN/LEFT)

For each of these targets (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-UP-RAMP, see Figure1), we created a same-manner (different-path) variant (e.g. tomato-ROLLs-DOWN-RAMP), and three types of same-path (different-manner) variants (here, OUNCE/SLIDE/SPIN-UP-RAMP).

This resulted in 72 triads with a target clip, a same-manner variant and one of the three same-path variants. The variants were presented side by side, 1 second after the target-clip presentation ended (see Figure 1).

(figure from page 7)

Their methodology was as follows (emphasis added to help readability):

The 72 triads were distributed across 6 randomized presentation lists in a Latin-square design.
Each list was given to two participants per language (in reverse presentation order).
Each list contained 12 triads, with the target clips combining the four manners of motions with the three scenarios so that each participant saw all 12 combinations in the target clip.
The number of UP/RIGHT and DOWN/LEFT motions in the target- and variant-clips as well as the manners of motions in the different-manner variants was counterbalanced across the lists, as was the position in which the variants were presented on the screen.
The position of the ground objects remained the same in all clips.
Minimal variations in the triad clips allow us to take into account the effects of different manners, paths and scenarios, but make our test triads quite similar.
Added 38 filler triads to each list, which involved other types of events and variations (e.g. replacing either the agent or the goal in a possession-transfer event with another character) and served to prevent the participants from settling into a fixed response pattern.
Instructions to participants were translated into their native languages.

So participants were watching a bunch of short videos in sets of three [A, B, C]. If I understand correctly, for each set, they were asked to determine if B or C is more similar to A than the other. For example, imagine I show you three cartoons:

A) a tomato rolling up a hill (forget physics, it's cartoon world).
B) a tomato rolling down a hill.
C) a tomato bouncing up a hill.

Then I ask you to chose B or C as more similar to A (forced choice, you gotta pick one). If you say B, then the manner of rolling is more salient for you than directional path. If you say C, then directional path is more salient than manner.

Now, if your native language forces you to push path information into separate phrases like prepositional phrases (e.g., "up a hill"), it may be the case that this would cause you to say C is more similar because the path is the same. Hence your language caused your perception of similarity to behave in a particular way, hence language affects thought.

So what did they discover?

First, they found no simple categorical distinction between verb-frame language speakers and satellite-language speakers decisions. If they had, it would have been fairly strong evidence for linguistic relativity and maybe then they'd be the ones writing WSJ articles instead of Broditsky, haha.

They did find that manner of motion by itself seemed to influence similarity judgement significantly (in the technical sense), but this influence was independent of language (i.e., it didn't have anything clearly to do with verb-framing or satellite-framing).

They found that the data they gathered could not be accounted for by socio-cultural factors because they had such a diverse participant pool.

Interestingly, they did find that contrasts between certain manner pairs DID correlate significantly with language. So, Turkish speakers (a verb-frame language) chose the video with the same manner 88% of the time when the contrast was slide vs. roll, but only 50% of the time when it was roll vs. bounce. They left open the question of why this is so.

The most striking conclusion, however, was that more is better in the sense that they discovered that "strong claims regarding the (in)validity of the Whorfian hypothesis in the encoding of motion events cannot be made on the basis of a limited number of languages or a restricted range of manner and path contrasts." (emphasis added).

I found the following passage to be the most important in the paper, especially wrt Fausey and Broditsky's work:

If only Polish (an S-language) and Yukatek (a V-language) had been selected to test for language-specific performance effects in our nonlinguistic task, the highly significant difference between speakers of these two languages in their degree of manner preference would have supported a strong version of the Whorfian claim. Conversely, had we chosen only to contrast German (S) with Spanish (V) using the identical stimuli and experimental procedure, we would have reached the opposite conclusion, since speakers of these languages do not differ significantly from one another in the frequency with which they base their similarity judgements on manner of motion.

The lesson here is that methodology counts. Fausey and Broditsky used a very small participant pool and it's hard to tell how that affected their results.

FYI: the word profound does not occur in Bohnemeyer's article.

Through the Language Glass (Part 2) [reposted]

2011-06-29T16:18:00.000-04:00

This is part 2 of my review of Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. This covers The Language Lens (129-249). Part 1 is here. This review will cover the scientific evidence that Deutscher reviews suggesting that language affects thought, and will end with a shocking proposal.

To sum up my review of part one: meh. Okay, we've established that culture can influence language. This is a lot less controversial than Deutscher makes it seem and he spent a large amount of text defending that position. Okay, whatever, time to move on. In part 2 he again begins with historical review explaining why he thinks Whorf was a con man, but also why he thinks the core insights of early linguist relativity deserve closer, honest investigation. He complains that based his Hopi claims on just one lonely informant (p142). We'll see later that Deutscher himself falls for the same trap. He replaces Whorf with the Boas-Jakobson principle that languages differ in what they must convey, not what they may convey” (151). I respect Deutscher for making this a central theme in his book because I think he's right. To parrot his own recitation of Humbolt: any thought can be expressed in any language. It is what our native language forces us to foreground that makes linguistic relativity an interesting topic.

Deutscher spends most of the second part of the book reviewing three areas of language that have provided evidence that language affects thought: spatial coordinates, grammatical gender, and color terms (familiar from part 1). The general point I want to make about his evidence is that it is far weaker than he maintains. But is is interesting. A brief set of reactions:

Spatial Coordinates -- everything is embodied
Most of his argumentation about the affect of spacial coordinate terms on thought stems from Levinson's evidence from speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr which is famous for giving us the word “kangaroo.” Speakers of GY do not generally use ego-centric terms like "right" and "left" but rather use cardinal direction terms like "east" and "west." As a result, Deutscher claims, they remember information about situations differently than speakers of English. They have, so the argument goes, a perfect pitch for direction and they are always attuned to where north is. Deutscher's claim is that only the linguistic repetition of such terms can possibly account for this. Hence, their language affects what they pay attention to and what they remember, hence language affects thought.

I've never found this line of research all that convincing regarding linguistic relativity and Deutscher does not really add much to the debate. Like Deutscher's complaint above regarding Whorf's one lonely Hopi speaker, it turns out there are not many native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr left and haven't been for a while. These experiments on directional language involve very few speakers, and most of them have both cardinal direction and ego-centric direction in their dialect. If we're going to complain about Whorf's restricted subject pool, we must complain about Levinson's too.

But more to the point, I believe all direction terms are ultimately ego-centric insofar as they are embodied. The terms "north" and "south" are not magically universal. They are based on a human being's body and orientation (i.e., ego-centric). Don't believe me, ask yourself, what does "north" mean in space? What does "north" mean to an amoeba? Mostly what Deutscher does in his discussions of direction terms is reiterate the point he belabored in Part 1: culture affects language. Yeah, we got that already.

The rise of similarity judgments
That is until he discusses the table experiments. These experiments show subjects tables with objects on them and ask them to arrange them in accordance with a target. Basically, they ask for similarity judgement. How can you make this table arrangement similar to the previous table. This methodological paradigm has become prominent in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, especially studies testing linguistic relativity. In fact, all of the studies Deutscher discusses are similarity judgment studies of one sort or another. The point is that I show you one target thing, then two test things and ask, which test is MORE SIMILAR to the target than the other? Ultimately Deutscher himself problematizes spatial coordinate terms so much, they fall flat and remain unconvincing as a base of evidence for linguistic relativity.

Grammatical Gender
Most languages have terms for classifying things. Some languages have more elaborate classifier systems than others. In German, the term for the fork is die Gabel, marked by feminine die. Ultimately, most languages with elaborate classifiers have systems that can be described as incoherent in so far as most things given one classification have no inherent properties that signify that classification (there is nothing inherently feminine about a fork). However, Deutscher provides evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender will evoke properties of things in keeping with their gender classifier, suggesting that the classifier is causing them to imagine a fork would speak with a female voice, for example. But these experiments mainly test vague associations of imagination, not linguistic causality, as Deutscher admits.

Color Terms
It is not until chapter 9 Russian Blues that Deutscher really delivers the goods. It is this chapter which provides the most interesting evidence for the effect of language on thought. Pity it is only about 15 pages of the book. The whole book should have been more like this. The facts he discusses involve the basic point that the brain sees what it wants to see. It turns out our perception of color has little to do with any objective feature of the thing we're looking at (he explains this fact brilliantly in the Appendix which I highly recommend, and frankly, should have been the first chapter, not relegated to the attic of an appendix). The point is that our brains change the input. As our eyes take in objective photons, our brain photoshops the input (a great analogy from Deutscher which really brings the point home).

The experimental results Deutscher discusses involve more similarity judgements, albeit with a twist. Instead of relying solely on the similarity judgments, researchers studied the more objective reaction time. They showed people different color patches and asked them to judge the sameness. Despite the various and clever variations on this theme, they all relied on subjective judgements of similarity. And this is where they fail to extricate themselves from the problem of strategizing.

Unfortunately they all share the critical flaw that making a similarity judgment is a logical reason act and may be mitigated by strategizing. Deutscher discusses this fact, but doesn't realize that none of the fixes work. A similarity judgment is always a logical process susceptible to the effects of strategizing. This will be a major issue in my Shocking Proposal at the end. You see, regardless of how clever the test, as long as you are basically asking a subject to make a similarity judgment, you are asking them to reason about the task. So your results will be tinged by the strategizing of human subjects as they logically try to game the system. This is well known in psycholinguistics and difficult to avoid. So how do you objectively test what colors a person considers blue?

A Shocking Proposal
The paradigm already exists. How can you objectively prove that English speakers really do consider aspirated /kh/ and unaspirated /k/ both the same phoneme? You condition them to fear aspirated /kh/ by shocking them every time they hear it (measuring their galvanic skin response). Once they are conditioned, you then play them unaspirated /k/ (with no shock) and check to see if you get the same GSR spike (in anticipation).

Okay, now apply this to color terms. Condition subjects to fear center of the category blue, then show them gradations. What causes the GSR spike? That's what they consider blue. now do that with speakers of 40 different languages.

If the hippies on the human subjects review board let you do it, there's your dissertation.

Guy Deutscher (2010). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books

Super 8: more homework than movie

2011-06-18T10:29:00.000-04:00

A rare non-linguistics post: Saw Super 8. Critics are spot on: it's a movie that shows how to construct a coherent narrative like they used to make. It is simple, straight forward. It makes contemporary movies like Transformers, Thor, and Pirates seem amateurish and sad. It's like a tutorial in narrative film-making.

Unfortunately, it's like a tutorial in narrative film-making ... more like homework than enjoyment. I felt like I should be taking notes. Like there'd be a quiz at the end.

One reason this is so is simple modern history. 30 years ago, good narrative films were strictly the domain of Hollywood. TV was the domain of kitsch and schmaltz. But since the 1990s, TV (largely due to HBO, and more recently Showtime, TNT, AMC...) has taken over the mantel of prime story teller. We know from good narratives. We know from good structure. We know from good plot. We know from good formula (we loved Law and Order for 20 years, after all).

So now, in 2011, the ET/Goonies routine rings a bit hollow. Like movie-plot-by-the-book; paint-by-numbers film making. Sure, it's more coherent than Thor (a truly gawdawful film), but Breaking Bad and Mad Men are still way better, and they don't cost me $11 and a special trip. Don't even get me started on how much better the revived Doctor Who is than this Hollywood trash.

simple english wikipedia

2011-06-15T10:03:00.000-04:00

I didn't know this existed until it was referenced briefly in an unrelated article. Simple English Wikipedia:

This is the front page of the Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use Simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone! That includes children and adults who are learning English.

Great idea! I perused some of the articles relating to linguistics, language, and grammar. Not bad. Under Grammar, they write:

When we speak, we use the native-person's grammar, or as near as we can. When we write, we try to write with correct usage grammar. So, speaking and writing a language each have their own style.

While one may want to quibble a little with this (I don't quite understand the "as near as we can" hedge), it's actually a nice way to explain the difference between speaking and writing to, say, a 10 year old.

Shakespeare and the brain? maybe not...

2011-04-28T09:50:00.001-04:00

Jezebel, The Guardian, and other sources have been promoting recent neuroscience involving reading Shakespeare. This research has popped up in the blogosphere before and was widely misunderstood. I fear this time is no better, so I offer this re-posting of my original response from late 2007:

Even though he blogs at a mere undergrad level I basically respect Andrew Sullivan as a blogger. He blogs about a diverse set of topics and has thoughtful and intelligent (even if controversial) comments and analysis. And he’s prolific, to say the least (surely the advantage of being a professional blogger, rather than stealing the spare moment at work while your test suite runs its course). That said, he can sometimes really come across as a snobbish little twit. Like yesterday when he linked to an article about Shakespearean language which talks about a psycholinguistics study initiated by an English professor, Philip Davis ; as is so often the case, the professor has wildly exaggerated the meaning of the study. Please see Language Log’s post Distracted By The Brain for related discussion. Here’s crucial quote from that post:

The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

My claim: the neuroscience study discussed in the Davis article distracts the reader from Davis’s essentially absurd interpretations, and Andrew Sullivan takes the bait, hook, line and sinker (and looks like a twit in the end).

The article does not go into the crucial details of the study, but it says that it involves EEG (electroencephalogram) and MEG (magnetoencephalograhy) and fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) noting that only the EEG portion has been completed. A pretty impressive array of tools for a single psycholinguistics study, I must say. Most published articles in the field would involve one or maybe two of these, but all three for a single study? Wow, impressive.

It’s not clear to me if this was a well designed study or not (my hunch is, no, it is a poorly designed study, but without the crucial details, I really don’t know). However, it is undeniable that professor Davis has gone off the deep end of interpretation. The study does not even involve Shakespearean English!!! It involves Modern English! Then Davis makes the following claims (false, all of them, regardless of the study):

["word class conversion"] is an economically compressed form of speech, as from an age when the language was at its most dynamically fluid and formatively mobile; an age in which a word could move quickly from one sense to another… (underlines added)

This is the classic English professor bullshit. I don’t even know what “economically compressed” means (Davis gives no definition); it has no meaning to linguistics that I know of. The quote also suggests Shakespeare’s English had some sort of magical linguistic qualities that today’s English does not possess. FALSE! Modern English allows tremendous productivity of constructions, neologisms, and ambiguity. A nice introduction to ambiguity can be found here: Ambiguous Words by George A. Miller.

Davis ends with a flourish of artistic bullshit hypothesizing:

For my guess, more broadly, remains this: that Shakespeare's syntax, its shifts and movements, can lock into the existing pathways of the brain and actually move and change them—away from old and aging mental habits and easy long-established sequences.

Neuroplasticity is only just now being studied in depth and it’s far from well understood, but the study in question says NOTHING about plasticity!!! There’s also no reason to believe that Shakespeare’s language does anything that other smart, well crafted language does not do. And we’re a generation at least away from having the tools to study any of this.

I’m accustomed to simply letting these all too common chunks of silliness go without comment, but then Andrew had to slip in his unfortunate bit of snooty arrogance. After pasting a chunk of the obvious linguistics bullshit on his site (then follow-up comments), he has to finish with "I knew all that already". Exactly what did you know, Andrew? Since all of the major claims Davis makes are obvious bullshit, what exactly do you claim to have had prior knowledge of? What did Andrew know, and when did he know it?

Really, Andrew, did you never take so much as a single linguistics course during all your years at Harvard and Oxford? The University at Maryland has excellent psycholinguists as does Georgetown. Please, consider sitting in on a course, won’t you?

Google linguist interview

2011-04-11T10:53:00.006-04:00

Purpose: This post reviews my experience interviewing for a Linguist position at Google in Santa Monica, CA on February 29, 2008. I've long meant to post this but only now got around to it. There are lots of Google interview stories on the web. It appears to be its own genre. This is my contribution to the genre.

I originally wrote it as an email to a friend who wanted to know how my big day at Google went. It’s rather long, but then again, you don’t have to read it, you clearly have better things to do…

I found a job posting on the Google jobs board for a full time Linguist. I applied and was given a phone interview with a recruiter around late January, 2008:

Thank you for your interest in Google. I'd like to set up a time for us to discuss Google Linguist opportunities and your qualifications. Please let me know a day/time when you would be available to speak with me as well as the best phone number for me to contact you. I'll email you back to confirm.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers,
JF
Google Staffing

During that phone interview the recruiter shared a Google doc which I was instructed to complete in about 45 minutes…

I do not recall the exact questions, but they mostly dealt with asking me to rank ads with web pages results (e.g., if I do a Google search for “lock” and an ad for a locksmith appears, how relevant to the search term was that ad?). It also gave me topics and asked me to provide example web pages that matched the topics.

Once done with this task it was clear that the position I was applying for was not a linguist in any traditional sense.

After they reviewed my answers I was granted a phone interview with a “Linguist” at Google that occurred about a week after the online doc interview.

During this week I snooped around and discovered some interesting facts: The back story is that Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics in 2003. This company was based in Santa Monica, so the office stayed there. Applied Semantics created AdSense, a Latent Semantic Analysis-style algorithm to compare the linguistic similarity of web pages and ads. That company hired people they called "linguists" to 1) evaluate the quality of the comparisons and 2) build and test taxonomies of web pages and ads. These people now work for Google. They also routinely hire people on 1 year contracts to act as test evaluators (see here), but I was interviewing for a full-time, permanent position.

Before the trip, I had a phone interview with LS in the taxonomy group. He had a PhD in formal semantics (I’m pretty sure he was a UCLA linguistics alum). I would say his academic background more closely matched his Google work than anyone else. I don’t recall the specifics of that interview, but I must have done well enough to be invited to fly to Santa Monica for a full day of interviews in late February 2008.

Hi Christopher,

We are very excited that you are coming to talk with us about opportunities here at Google! I've scheduled your interviews per the availability that you gave to JF. We look forward to seeing you on Friday, February 29, 2008 at 10:45am. Your interviews will last approximately 2 to 5 hours. Please ask for MC upon arrival.

Google takes an academic approach to its interviewing process. This means that we are interested in your thought process, your approach to problem solving, and in your programming skills as well. You may also be asked questions that relate to algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems. The dress is business casual/something you are comfortable in (we are more interested in what you have to say than what you are wearing).

The trip began oddly. I was booked into a more expensive hotel than I was originally told (I had to pay for it myself and wait for re-imbursement). Plus, my whole coast-to-coast trip was 36 hours long. Little time to adjust.

I want to give my general impressions of those Google interviews. Nothing specific (because I don’t recall the specifics, hehe) but rather the "vibe" I got. Keep in mind I interviewed with what they call "linguists", not with any engineers, so these are people outside their core employee constituency. I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of the people I interviewed with were hired by the previous company Applied Semantics prior to the Google acquisition.

Generally speaking, I walked away thinking I was qualified to perform any and all of the tasks they described (at least as qualified as anyone I met with given their own backgrounds). I felt like all of these people were smart, but performing tasks for which they had no special training.

I met with five people on-site in addition to my phone interview with LS earlier. One had a PhD in linguistics but on a theoretical topic and one was ABD in art history (both non-empirical methods training) and the phone interview guy had a PhD in linguistics and formal semantics (again, non-empirical training) but he had done empirical, lab-based linguistics work as a post-doc at a well respected east coast university. One person had a B.A in linguistics and another had a B.A. in literature and classics. One guy had a B.A. in French and literature and was a professional translator before being hired.

Almost all of them had been hired prior to the Google acquisition, so they mostly had 6 or more years of experience doing the job, but none seemed to have prior training that matched. I was encouraged by this as my own background did not match what they did. Apparently, that was fine with them.

There were two "groups" of linguists that I met with (literally in different buildings a couple blocks from each other in downtown Santa Monica (near the 3rd street promenade) and very close to the beach. Group one dealt mostly with the taxonomy, or categorization, of web pages and ads (e.g., is web page X a kind of sports page or auction page, etc). The second group dealt with human evaluation of relevance of ad + search correspondence (e.g., ‘how relevant is ad X to web page Y?’).

The first interview I had during the trip was with a taxonomy guy M. who had a BA in French and was a translator who was hired pre-acquisition. He had been with this group for almost 10 years, and he was now a "project manager" and he had the authority to originate his own projects. We discussed a series of things that I felt were close to what I am good at and I liked that interview the best. But, I realized that this guy I was talking to had had little background for the stuff he was doing. He must have learned entirely on-the-job. He asked me two semi-technical questions: He asked me to define “precision” and “recall” (easy) and then he asked me which would be better to use on a new project and why, ASCII or UTF-8 (UTF-8). He described two projects he was working on (one involved trying to auto-detect compound nouns and their relationships, like the difference between “hotdog” and “wedding cake”) and I thought to myself, "why is a guy like you working on that? These are computational linguistics problems. There are people who have solid training in this. Why is a French translator doing this?"

Part of the answer to this is the corporate culture of Google. They let anyone at his level initiate any project they want. He just has to show some kind of results at some point. That probably works great when you have a small group of talented engineers working on tasks within their field of specialization, but when you get so big that you let French translators try to solve problems that PhDs in computational linguistics try to solve, it's bound to go bad.

The second guy I met with, J., only had lunch with me so it wasn't really an "interview". He had a B.A. in lit and classics. I got the worst vibe from him. He wasn't very talkative and I got the impression he wasn't very ambitious. He had been there as long as the first guy, but seemed to be doing lower level tasks, and I think he liked it that way. I felt I had to work a bit too hard to get him to talk, like he was barely tolerating my presence.

After lunch I moved to the second group who deal with human evaluators where I met with three people. I liked everyone I met. They were all responsible for designing online studies to test relevance. These tests were web based human evaluations. I had spent a few years tangentially associated with a psycholinguistics lab in grad school. That lab ran experiments on human subjects testing the natural processing of sentences. I also taught a psycholinguistic course. I have a modest background in testing methodology. I'm not a pro by any means, but at least I've had some exposure to experimental methods.

I felt like most of these people had nothing even close to training in experimental design. The first person, TW, had a BA in linguistics from Berkeley. That’s a nice degree, but it’s unlikely she had much experimental design experience at that level. Unfortunately, I was also suffering a bit of a post-lunch lull in energy and jet lag during her interview, so my concentration and energy was off and I fumbled a bit with some of her hypothetical situations. I felt I did the worst with her.

The second evaluation guy, C., was ABD in art history. I tended to over-talk with him and he had to cut me off a few times in order to ask more questions. I may have been over-compensating given my weak performance with TW just before. The final guy, A.M., had a PhD in linguistics (again, from UCLA). His diss was an OT analysis of something. His advisors were Steriade and Hayes as I recall. We seemed to have the most fun together and laughed quite a bit (I was also loopy from jet lag and a full day of interviews). He accidentally stabbed me with his pencil at one point. It didn’t hurt, but I joked about it. “The guy’s almost outta here and you killed him!”

All of the second group’s interviews went roughly the same. Each one kept asking me how I would design an evaluation for specific kinds of relevancy tasks. Essentially, it was a bunch of what-if questions. They all seemed most interested in my ability to understand experimental methodology.

After the day was done, I walked to the beach (it was over 70 mdegrees and I was about to fly back to the east coast with temps in the teens). I literary took my shoes off and just stood in the warm Pacific ocean for an hour.

So, they’ve got a French translator doing computational linguistics and an art historian doing experimental human evaluation. Hmmmm? What to make of this?

I don’t want to give the impression that I think a person’s college degree pigeon-holes their career. Not at all; my own career proves the opposite, but Google is famous for hiring highly trained subject matter experts. The Google Linguists are different. They are not doing linguistics. Therefore, my own education and experience should have been no more of an issue than the people with whom I interviewed. I feel my resume was at least as good as anyone there for the tasks they described.

Another suspicious part was the fact that at least four of these interviewers asked me if I would be comfortable doing all the little, day-to-day tasks associated with the job. M. even went so far as to say “we support the engineers”. The message I received was that they are low men on the totem pole. I gave the same answer I always give to this question: This is what being a professional means. You do whatever tasks it takes to get the job done.

I left feeling very good. I felt my resume matched well with the people I met and the interviews mostly went well. Three years later, I still haven’t heard from them. Any chance they’re still mulling it over?

open science

2011-03-16T07:33:00.003-04:00

Recently in North Carolina, moximer & David Dobbs and others discussed the value of opening up science research (such that all research is freely available for searching and interpretation, even draft versions and failed experiments, at least under the strong proposal). It's an interesting discussion (audio is a bit crappy, but whaddayagonnado?):

What's Keeping Us from Open Science? Is It the Powers That Be, Or Is It... Us? from Smartley-Dunn on Vimeo.

Hence, I thought it might be nice to list some open source journals offering free access to scientific research:

PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

CiteSeer: The NEC Scientific Literature Digital Library incorporating autonomous citation indexing, awareness and tracking, citation context, related document retrieval.

arXiv.org e-Print archive: Open access to 664,014 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

Directory of open access journals: This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 6271 journals in the directory. Currently 2722 journals are searchable at article level.

Wikipedia Open access journals. A list of open access journals...

Google "open journals"

Cognitive Science Network directed by Mark Turner (HT Sport Linguist).

Free Full Text: a search engine returning full text scientific articles with no access fees.

Korean in Killeen

2011-03-12T12:40:00.000-05:00

Having spent nearly 4 months of the last year and a half working at Fort Hood, in Killeen Texas, I finally decided to leave the safe confines of the hotel-centric chain restaurants and Target/Wal-Mart shopping centers and take a drive to historic downtown Killeen. I found pretty much what I expected to find, empty one storey store fronts, dusty unused parking spaces, and lots of lots of Hangul ... (screeching sound) ... huh?

Yep, turns out historic downtown Killeen, heartland of America, is being somewhat revitalized by Korean immigration. My favorite grocery store by far is the Korean O-Mart (not the one pictured above, btw), where I can find genuinely fresh vegetables and dumplings (as well as shitake mushrooms, plenty of seaweed for soup, and a wide array of spicy sauces that I have been eagerly experimenting with).

It was a nice lesson in American multi-linguialism.

turning gaga into water = 200 terabytes

2011-03-07T08:33:00.001-05:00

How much storage would it take to store the first 5 years of a child's linguistic environment? Apparently, 200 terabytes. From Fast Company:

...cognitive scientist Deb Roy Wednesday shared a remarkable experiment that hearkens back to an earlier era of science using brand-new technology. From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family's every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. A combination of new software and human transcription called Blitzscribe allowed them to parse 200 terabytes of data to capture the emergence and refinement of specific words in Roy’s son’s vocabulary.

The data visualization techniques he uses are pretty cutting edge ... and awesome! I love the fact that he is trying to use visualization techniques to help us understand something beyond raw statistics (which is where most graphs and pie charts die miserable deaths). Statistics are like molecules. Visualize them one by one and it's difficult for the average person to conceptualize the big picture of how they work together to create a grander whole. Roy appears to be trying to get beyond the yawn-inducing graphs that plague modern science. I mean, he uses freaky-deaky time-worms! How cool is that!

Roy talk's about feed-back loops as well:

..."Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.

He gave a TED talk recently, but the video is not yet available.

Hosni prefers "Hosny" in transliterated attire

2011-03-03T08:33:00.001-05:00

Rachel Maddow et al. discovered a delicious gem fit for the annals of transliteration. Namely, how to write a specific Arabic name in the Roman alphabet (what we English speakers like to call "regular spelling"). She (and her staff) reported that Hosni Mubarak attended a head-of-state meeting in Albania a couple years ago wearing the world's most narcissistic pinstriped suit*, where the pin stripes were actually composed of lines of his name written in Roman alphabetic transliteration (this man really knows how to live the life of a tyrant, am I right?):

It is a troublesome fact of human language that writing the damned thing down is never easy. It's difficult enough to construct a writing system that is consistent for a single language, more difficult still to take a linguistic term (like a person's name) and write it down in a script which was not designed for that particular language. So when English language writers (like journalists) have to write down Arabic names in "regular spelling" they inevitably face difficult choices about which letters to use to represent particular sounds. Vowels are particularly difficult creatures to pin down with alphabetic rope (e.g., the whole and sometimes y fiasco).

The act of writing a linguistic term in a foreign script is called transliteration, and it's troublesome enough to have spawned a cottage industry sub-field within computational linguistics. For example, if you wanted to Google information about the currently exiled president of Egypt, you would be wise to Google the term "Hosni Mubarak." That is by far the most common spelling of the man's name on the internet (by a better than 20-1 margin, at least according to Google hit counts). Even if you choose the "Hosny" variant, you're basically just redirected to the "Honsi" results anyway. Yet the tyrant himself, ever the maverick, prefers the road less traveled.

Sadly, there's not much more to say about this than to emphasize the simple fact that transliteration is largely arbitrary and disputes about guidelines are largely trivial. Just flip a coin and move on ... (I just seriously pissed off the world's four transliteration experts).

...and in closing I'd like to repeat my assertion that Hosni/y Mubarak looks suspiciously like The Face of Bo**:

*FYI, I have no independent verification of the truth of this story. If Maddow's staff got punk'd, their bad.
**Damn you Captain Jack!!

the linguistics of 404 FILE NOT FOUND

2011-02-23T10:33:00.001-05:00

A cute site providing humorous translations of the world's most frustrating search result. Personal favs:

American South - Ah cain't find th' page yer lookin' fer.
Australia - Strewth mate yer bloody page has shot through.
Blond - like omg! ur file has not been found, go paint ur nails and try back later, lol^^....I FOUND A QUARTER!
Cockney - No chance luv, carrnt find it neever.
Pirate - Haaarr, Lubber! I've sailed yon seas with toil and trial, and yet I cannot find ye file!
Pittsburghese - This page needs fixed n'at... it's all caddywhompus! Yinz needs look somewheres else.
Zombie - Arrgrg 404 BrAiNs aAAArrggh No ggrrgrh page brAiNz heRe BrAAAAIIINNSSSS!

fuck C++

2011-02-23T08:33:00.001-05:00

Andrew Vos provides us with valuable data analysis of the correlation between programming languages and profanity:

The plan was to find out how much profanity I could find in commit messages, and then show the stats by language. These are my findings: Out of 929857 commit messages, I found 210 swear words (using George Carlin's Seven dirty words).

Oh, Python, beautiful Python ... no wonder the NLTK guys chose it as their NLP language of choice.

economists are bad linguists

2011-02-20T10:16:00.000-05:00

Dominik Lukes at Metaphor Hacker has a thorough discussion of Harvard economist Ed Glaeser's mis-use of metaphor theory by trying to use NYC restaurants as a metaphor for schools. Lukes teases out the mis-mappings that Glaeser fails to recognize. Money quote:

[Restaurants] also use a number of tricks to make the dining experience better – cheat on ingredients, serve small portions on large plates, etc. They rely on ‘secret recipes’ – the last thing we want to see in education. And this is exactly the experience of schools that compete in the market. They fudge, cheat and flat out lie to protect their competitive advantage. They provide the minimum of education that they can get away with to look good. Glaeser, as he conveniently forgets, there is a huge amount of centralized oversight of New York restaurants – much more, in some ways, than on charter schools.

The full discussion is thorough and well worth reading.

evolution = chaos?

2011-02-18T08:33:00.000-05:00

Kottke points to a graphical variation of the Chinese whispers game whereby an original sign (in this case, a line drawn by a human) is rapidly degraded by multiple repetitions (the more people try to repeat the original line, the less line-like it becomes, eventually degrading into chaos).

A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from clement valla on Vimeo.

Kottke marvels that "The lines get really messy surprisingly fast [...] this is a nice demonstration of evolution."

But is it? Is it the case that evolution leads to chaos*? I don't think so. Evolution leads to variation and change, sure, but chaos? The difference between evolution and this line transformation, I think, is pressures. In evolution there are pressures that greatly effect which changes last more than one generation and hence become ~~permanent~~ stable. But in this game, there are no pressures, as far as I can tell. There is no survival of the fittest because each turn gets to survive for exactly one generation with no pressure to be fitter than another in order to persist beyond one generation. So this exercise, cute as it may be, does not resemble evolution at all, I don't think.

*or messiness in Kottke's phrasing

Ngram Viewer sucks, true dat

2011-02-14T22:18:00.000-05:00

proof positive....

true dat...

Linguist List FAIL

2011-02-08T09:33:00.001-05:00

I've been kicked around a few NLP blocks in my time so I've developed a sixth sense about what employers are looking for when they post job announcements. When I read this one from Intelius on The Linguist List today, my reaction was clear, concise, and unconditional: This is NOT for linguists.

This posting says engineers only to me! There's nothing wrong with that, but why use the Linguist Lists' job postings board with a job that no actual linguist will be considered for? My reaction is based on what I consider to be engineering dog-whistles that are designed to encourage the "right" people to apply (i.e., engineers) and the wrong people to go away (i.e., linguists).

A quick breakdown of their rhetorical dog-whistles:

The Data Research Group is a team of scientists at Intelius... Much as I would like linguists to be considered scientists, the truth is, in the "real world" of job announcements, they are not. This is a red flag.
Team members have published papers in top research conferences...Ah hah, not "conferences" per se, but "research conferences". This means ACL.
Mentors will include Dr. Vitor R. Carvalho and Dr. Andrew Borthwick (diss PDF)... NOT linguists.
Required Skills: Strong hands-on skills in Java and/or Python... i.e., we assume you lay awake at night worrying about arrays and functions, not unnaccusative marking and tone sandhi.
Required Skills: Self-motivated, creative, and independent researching skills ... we will teach you nothing. You are on your own. Your teachers are gone. What can you give us?

FYI: Recently, bulbul has quite rightly taken me to task for being a tad hypocritical in arguing two seemingly contradictory points: (1) that 21st Century linguists should study math and (2) that the time consuming effort of learning computational tools is a deterrent to being a linguist. I can imagine this post as falling victim to that same complaint. My pre-defense is that I believe there is a skill set distinct to linguists that is valuable and worthy of investment by NLP capitalists that has been largely ignored.

Engineers alone will not solve the critical language issues necessary to create the great products of the next generation of NLP tools. I believe in team building where linguists and engineers work together as equals

our foundational tongues?

2011-02-08T07:33:00.001-05:00

A commentator at The Daily Dish writes: I recently learned that in our foundational tongues of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew the words for breath and spirit are one and the same: spiritus, pneuma, and ruach [emphasis added].

I'm not sure what the author had in mind for "our foundational tongues." Assuming the author is referring to English, then Latin, okay sure, Romance languages have had an important influence on English. Greek, less so. But Hebrew??? What's most striking is the notable lack of Germanic languages as "foundational." This author needs a Ling 101 class.

And as for the author's claim about words for breath and spirit being the same, there is a related poetic pairing common to good ol' fashioned English. The word breath is often used as a metonymy for life or spirit. Here are a few choice examples:

The Bard
Henry V -- King Henry's Once more unto the breach, dear friends speech (III, 1):

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!

In my reading of this line, King Henry pairs holding of the breath with spiritual courage to draw a parallel between the two.

Hamlet -- Hamlet's Mother, Queen Gertrude, whilst arguing with her tortured son (III, 4):

Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me .

Prior to this line, Hamlet prods his mother to stop sleeping with his uncle/king and to "break your own neck down." In my reading of her lines, Gertrude connects the dots between words, breath, and spirit because of her son's harsh words. She is saying it is not in my spirit to do what you are asking of me.

And here is a really nice 2009 discussion of poetry and breath by Melissa Zeiger: Grace Paley's Poetics of Breath. Money quote:

The Romantic poets reemphasized breath as a force in poetry, liking to imagine that poetic breath mediated between the human and the transcendent, as, famously, in Coleridge's “The Eolian Harp,” where the wind joins breath to participate in “one Life within us and abroad,/ Which meets all motion and becomes its soul”

And this trope is not limited to Western literature either. The traditional Chinese concept of Qi is deeply rooted in an analogy of breath = life. From the Wikipedia page:

Qi is frequently translated as "energy flow". Qi is often compared to Western notions of energeia or élan vital (vitalism), as well as the yogic notion of prana, meaning vital life or energy, and pranayama, meaning control of breath or energy. The literal translation of "qi" is air, breath, or gas. Compare this to the original meaning of the Latin word "spiritus", meaning breathing; or the Koine Greek "πνεῦμα", meaning air, breath, or spirit; and the Sanskrit term "prana", meaning breath.

What this suggests to me is that there is something deeply natural to our cognitive perceptions about this analogy between breath and life. It is natural for humans to perceive breathing and thinking to be related somehow. Without breath, you cannot think. Fair enough. But this might be a deeply human logic insofar as ants or dolphins may not conceive of this relationship in the same way. I blogged about this last year in Dolphin-Bikes and The Iconicity Effect. I'm still waiting for a dolphin bike.

why we need good tools...

2011-02-06T09:33:00.003-05:00

Because we're not all interested in being R experts. By far, the single most frustrating part of my own graduate linguistics experience was the fact that in order to study the kinds of linguistic phenomena I wanted to, I had to spend most of my time learning tools that I didn't actually care about, like Tgrep2, Perl, Python*, R, etc. As a linguist, I don't really give a damn about any of those things. They were all obstacles in my way. The more time I spent learning tools, the less interested in linguistics I became. I respect the hell out of engineers who build great tools that are valuable to linguists, but if those tools are not user friendly, I might as well scream into the darkness.

Which is why I am impressed with The Stanford Visualization Group's recent Visualization Tool for Cleaning Up Data:

Another thing I often hear is that a large fraction of the time spent by analysts -- some say the majority of time -- involves data preparation and cleaning: transforming formats, rearranging nesting structures, removing outliers, and so on. (If you think this is easy, you've never had a stack of ad hoc Excel spreadsheets to load into a stat package or database!).

Yes, more help please.

HT LingFan1

*Mad props to the NLTK!

2011-02-02T08:33:00.002-05:00

Neuro-blogger Bradley Voytek posts a nice discussion helping us all understand how to consume neuroscience in the news:

In this post, I will teach you all how to be proper, skeptical neuroscientists. By the end of this post, not only will you be able to spot "neuro nonsense" statements, but you'll also be able to spot nonsense neuroscience questions.

Well worth the read.

my classic snowclone rant

2011-02-01T10:23:00.002-05:00

As yet another winter storm threatens the US, lingo-tweeter cum lingo-grad student Lauren Ackerman marvels at the media's lust for snowmageddon and terms of its ilk, and I was reminded of my own ruminations on the many words for snow in my own peculiar dialect (it helped that I spent 6 hours in near motionless traffic a few days ago while the DC metro region was castrated by a vicious and sudden sleet storm that halted traffic as well as sanity). So I offer this re-post from February 5 2010:

As the snow descends upon Northern Virginia in the latest winter storm, and as DC's elite line-up at their local Whole Foods and Trader Joe's clutching their reusable bags filled with heavily packaged prepared meals, cardboard-container salads, 6 bottles of wine, and one bottle of water ('cause, ya know, it's an "emergency"), I am struck by the fact that the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax (pdf) is no hoax at all! It turns out that I too have a great many words for snow. This evening, while running a few modest errands before the night's predicted 20 inch snow drop, I meticulously recorded the various terms I uttered as synonyms for the fluffy white stuff which descended, rather gracefully, upon the landscape.

A few choice examples (NSFW):

shit

"Why do people drive like such morons in this shit?"
"Hey asshole! This shit's not Vasoline! You can drive faster that 6 miles an hour!"

crap

"This crap's gonna be piled up in disgusting dirty brown heaps for weeks."

fuck

"Fuck these fucking fuckers who can't drive in this fuck!"

asshole-shit-motherfucker*

"Ahhhh! You drive on this asshole-shit-motherfucker like it's nuclear!"

fucking-fuck-fuck

(directed at a plow driver) "push the fucking fuck fuck onto the curb, not back into the road!"

grrrrrrr

"gawd I hate everybody! All of you! All because of this ... grrrrrrr!" (picture head exploding)

*asshole-shit-motherfucker is actually quite productive in my dialect. It replaces a great many phrases.

Addendum (1-31-2011): I want to see a Visual Thesaurus word map of my words for snow!

the false narrative of small town slang

2011-01-31T20:41:00.004-05:00

There is a common critique of journalists that they often let an internal narrative color their reporting, to the point where they simply parrot back the narrative in their head rather than report the facts on the ground (see here for a discussion of this).

My hometown of Chico got its spotlight in the sun recently because its favorite son Aaron Rogers is the star quarterback of the Packers about to play in the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, the NYT's article is a near perfect example of journalists letting a narrative do the talking when the facts blatantly contradict their claims:

The usual slang words like awesome or cool are not heard much. Nice is in. As in: “You won the lottery? Nice.”

The narrative this spins is that small towns are all Mayberrys where everyone is pure and innocent and righteous and better than them damned city-folk. It has been evoked routinely in political reporting.

I'm a Chico boy. I graduated from Chico jr. High and walked across the street and graduated from Chico High then walked across the street and graduated from Chico State*. And I can assure you that awesome and cool are every bit as frequent there as anywhere else (personally, I had an unhealthy fondness for hella back in 1987). And believe me, if you won the lottery in Chico, no one would say nice. They would say, "No fukkin way! No fukkin way! Really! No fukkin way!" ... just like everywhere else.

*no joke, those three schools are literally across the street from each other.

how (not) to do linguistics

2011-01-31T09:34:00.001-05:00

Jonah Lehrer, the neuro-blogger, has a mixed track record, as far as I'm concerned. His initial blogging was nice, but a tad lightweight, then he started to sound a bit too Malcom Gladwell-ee (in that I wasn't entirely sure he knew what he was talking about beyond having a few short phone calls with one or two scientists then babbling on about a topic).

But he's hit a home run with this long New Yorker piece about the failure of the journal review process in science: The Truth Wears Off. He draws examples from medicine, physics, and psychology.

Perhaps the most disappointing part is the realization the the standards of testing and conclusiveness in linguistics are so far from those in more established science.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity.

Repeating studies is virtually unheard of in linguistics. Also, Lehrer mentions the publication bias in journals. When a result is discovered, there is a bias towards positive results. After a while, once the result is accepted, then only negative results are published because only that is "interesting" anymore. But I would expand this point to say this same bias exists at every stage of the research process. We want to find things that happen, we don't care about spending 5 years and thousands of hours discovering that X does NOT cause Y! So when young grad students begin scoping out a new study, they throw away anything that doesn't seem fruitful, where fruitful is defined as yielding positive results. This bias affects the very foundation of the research process, namely answering the basic question: what should I study?

As a side note, engineers seem perfectly happy to follow through on null results. They need to know the full scope of their problem before solving it. Scientists can learn a lot from engineers (and vice versa).

[Psychology professor Jonathan] Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,” Schooler says. “It would help us finally deal with all these issues that the decline effect is exposing.”

Coincidentally, I was recently tweeting with moximer and jasonpriem about this and we agreed that research wikis are worth explolring. My vision would be something akin to Wikipedia but where a researcher stores all of their data, stimuli, results, etc, finished or not. The data could be tagged as tentative, draft, failed, successful, etc. As the research goes on, the data get updated. Not only would this record failure (which, as Leherer points out in the article) is as valuable as success, it also records change. How did a study evolve over time?

True, the data would become huge over time across many disciplines, but that just means means we need better and better data mining tools (and the boys at LingPipe are working away at those tools).

HT rapella

the sociolinguistics of height in China

2011-01-28T11:52:00.002-05:00

Ingrid at Language on the Move has some thoughtful comments on the relationship between height and learning English in China. If you're under 1.6 meters, forget it. There are subtle but very real socioeconomic barriers in your way. Money quote:

I have supervised research related to English language learning and teaching in China for almost a decade and have read most of the research on the topic published in English. However, never before have I come across the importance of height. I take this as evidence for the importance of doing ethnographic research. Otherwise, what is the point of doing sociolinguistic research if you can’t discover anything you hadn’t already decided in advance would be important?!

I taught EFL in China back in 1998 at a private school in Guangzhou catering mostly to working professionals. Much has changed since then, as China has changed so much. I don't recall ever talking about height as a factor, but certainly cost and hours were a significant issue that made it virtually impossible for any poor workers to consider taking English classes. As a 6 foot 4 blond American, though, I was treated like a rock star. It was kinda weird.

chomsky and performance art

2011-01-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

Artist Annie Dorsen has created a chatbot performance piece around the debate between Noam Chomsky and Michele Foucault on Dutch TV in 1971 (videos here).

This snippet is mildly interesting, but I couldn't help wondering what technology was used, especially the speech synthesis, because, frankly, it's a bit clunky and old-fashioned. Perhaps that's part of the point. The computer screens appear to be running DOS shells too. Nothing wrong with that, purists will likely prefer it even, but combined with the clunky speech, the performance appears to be trading on a very outdated computational linguistic aesthetic. Truly the desert of the real? (okay, I had to through in some Baudrillard)

can a machine learn jazz?

2011-01-27T11:30:00.001-05:00

There's a contest dedicated to trying to answer that question: ISMIS 2011 Contest: Music Information Retrieval.

Computer scientists and engineers have long used contests and bake-offs to stimulate cutting edge research in linguistics (e.g., MUC), but linguists have lagged in this department. You rarely if ever hear about contests that pit one linguistic theory against another using a standardized data set (or maybe I've just missed them).

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues here that prizes are good for stimulating academic research. I agree whole heartedly and would like to see more direct competition between theorists. Exactly how a contest would be constructed is up for debate (I have a vague memory of some group trying to devise criteria by which to evaluate linguistic theories, maybe out of UCLA, but I can't seem to track it down; it's a remarkably difficult Google query to form).

HT: Jochen L. Leidner

the linguistics of heaven and hell

2011-01-27T07:33:00.008-05:00

The value of pop culture data for legitimate research is being put to the test. Exactly what, if anything, can the reality show Big Brother tell us about language change over time?

Voice Onset Time is a measure of how long you wait to begin vibrating your vocal folds after you release a stop consonant. Voiced stop consonants like /b/ and /d/ require two things: 1) stop all airflow from escaping the airway by closing the glottis and 2) after the air is released, begin vibrating the glottis (by using the rushing air). For non-linguists, think of a garden hose. Imagine you use your thumb to stop the water for a second and you let the pressure build, then you let go and water rushes out, but then you use your thumb to clamp down just a bit on the water to spray it. This is kinda like the speech production of voiced stop consonants in human language.

(image from Kval.com)

Though I’m no phoneticist, I really like VOT as a target of linguistic study for one crucial reason: it’s a clear example of a linguistic feature that varies according to your human language system but which you do NOT have conscious control over. What that means is that you cannot consciously change the length of your own personal VOT. Go ahead, try it. Make your VOT 20 milliseconds longer. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

Of course you can’t. Well, not consciously, but what researchers have found is that your brain, quite independent of conscious will or knowledge, can! Lab studies have found that people will unknowingly alter their VOTs according to certain situations, and the results are predictable. For example, they found that when listening to a set of long VOT stimuli, subjects will begin to lengthen their own VOTs, in essence accommodating the longer VOTs. Over the longer term it has also been shown that people will lengthen their VOT over their lifetime to accommodate cultural shifts. It has been shown that The Queen Mother herself had a longer VOT in her later life than during her younger days (few other people have been recorded consistently over a long period to provide such valuable data).

Here’s what Bane et al. did: They took recordings of confessional sequences from the UK reality TV show Big Brother (where groups of strangers are made to live with each other and occasionally speak to a camera alone like a video diary) and tested what happened to 4 crucial individuals (the ones that stayed on the show long enough to provide several months worth of data points). What they found was that their VOTs did in fact change, though no linear pattern was discovered (i.e., they did not simply get longer in a steady line). This paper is labeled as a progress report because they don't have a firm hypothesis about what actually is happening. Nice trick there boys, ;)

They did find one interesting thing: During part of the show, the house mates were physically divided into basically a caste system where half the people were low caste and half were high (a heaven and a hell). And this seemed to have an effect on VOT as well (sociolinguists are slap happy about this, I'm sure).

I haven’t looked at the actual numbers very closely, but in section 6, they say “Housemate trajectories seem to diverge when the divide is present…” However, just taking a glance at the Figure 3, it looks like they diverge at the beginning, then converge at the end, episode 65 (and remain somewhat similar until several episodes of non-DIVIDE have gone by). If my cursory glance is correct, I would assume it takes awhile for the convergence to manifest, and then it persists for awhile after DIVIDE is gone. But this is just me looking at the picture, not the actual data.

Finally, and this is just a readability point, but I would order the names in Figure 3 in the same order as the end point of each trajectory, making it easier to follow who is doing what.

Max Bane, Peter Graff, & Morgan Sonderegger (2011). Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system Linguistic Society of America 2011 Annual Meeting.

more jobs for linguists

2011-01-26T15:46:00.000-05:00

As the economy continues to grow (Dow over 12,000), so do the non-academic opportunities for linguists. Here's an interesting one for an Analyst in the California* Bay Area :

The Analyst looks for opportunities to improve our Natural Language and Directed-dialog applications using the data logged by them. The Analyst is primarily the responsible team member charged with analyzing the data and making new implementation recommendations [...] Besides analyzing our speech applications and improving our Analytics framework, you will also have the opportunity to carry out independent research, which forms a big part of the success of our speech applications [...]

*living in the metro DC region has taught this Northern California boy that there's more than one "Bay Area."

Call For Participation

2011-01-26T13:06:00.002-05:00

More and more researchers are using the web to gather data for serious research, but they need your help as participants. As a proponent, I like to do my part and share the calls for participation that I know about. If you know of any others, I'm happy to add:

MPI -- The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Investigates how people use language.

Cue-word memories -- Clare Rathbone, University of Reading: The study is specifically interested in the way people remember events from their lives. You will be asked to recall 16 memories and then rate them for details, such as vividness and how often you have thought about the memories before. You will also be asked to fill in two short questionnaires. Please note, this questionnaire is for people over the age of 40 only - please do not take part if you are aged 39 or younger.

Phrase Detectives -- University of Essex: Lovers of literature, grammar and language, this is the place where you can work together to improve future generations of technology. By indicating relationships between words and phrases you will help to create a resource that is rich in linguistic information.

Games With Words -- Joshua Hartshorne, Harvard University: Test your language sense! Play a game while participating in cutting-edge research. How good is your language sense?

Color Naming -- Dimitris Mylonas, London College of Communication: This is a multi-lingual colour naming experiment. It is part of research on colour naming and colour categorisation within different cultures, and aims to improve the inter-cultural colour dialogue. By taking part you are helping us to develop an online colour naming model which will be based on the "natural" language provided from your responses.

CogLab 2.0 -- The Cognitive Psychology Online Laboratory: Aggregated set of many online research projects.

do we need parsed corpora?

2011-01-26T08:48:00.000-05:00

Maybe not, according to Google: For many tasks, words and word combinations provide all the representational machinery we need to learn from text...invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data.

I've been wondering about this very issue for 5 years or so. When I first started collecting parsed BNC data for my defunct dissertation, I needed sentences involving various verbs and prepositions, but the examples I found were often of the wrong structural type because of preposition attachment ambiguity. I used Tgrep2 queries to find proper examples, but even then there were false positives, so I did some error correction. One of the more interesting discoveries I made was a relationship between a verb's role in its semantic class and its error rate.

I was trying to find a way to objectively define core members of a semantic verb class and peripheral members. I had a pretty good intuition about which were which, but I wanted to get beyond intuition (yes yes, it's all very Beth Levin).

For example, one of the objective clues for barrier verbs (a class of negative verbs encoding obstruction, like prevent, ban, exclude, etc) was the unusual role of the preposition from in sentences like these:

She prevented them from entering the pub.
He banned them from the pub.
They were excluded from the pub.

The preposition from is usually used to mark sources (He drove here from Buffalo) but in these sentences it's acting much more like a complementizer. This is fairly unique to barrier verbs and I felt it was distinctive of the verb class, so I wanted a bunch of examples. Because I needed to exclude examples involving old-fashioned source from, I used a Tgrep2 search that required the PP to be in a particular relationship to the verb (the BNC parse was a bit odd as I recall, and required some gymnastics).

Again, I had a lot of false positives even with Tgrep2 so I did some manual error analysis and discovered that certain verbs had very low error rates while others had very high rates and the difference coincided nicely with my intuition about which verbs were core members of the class and which were peripheral: core members like prevent had very low error rates. This means that when prevent is followed by a from-PP, it's almost always the complementizer from; obvious to adults, the meaning of a barrier verb doesn't easily include source (necessary for old-fashioned from), but how would a kid learn that? If I ban you from the pub, how does a kid know the pub is NOT where you started (source) but rather the opposite, it's where you're not allowed to end up (goal)? Cool little learning problem, I thought ... and with a data set other than frikkin dative (which Pinker and Levin have, let's face it, done to death).

I assumed there was something central to the meaning of the verb class that caused this special use of from. Then it occurred to me, if this is true, why do I need the parse? Imagine I ignore structure, take all sentences where from follows a relevant verb, then sample for false positives. That should give me basically the same thing.

I became increasingly fascinated with this methodology. I was now interested in how I was studying language, not what I was studying. And that led me to ask whether or not the parse info was all that valuable for other linguistic studies? But then I realized that when big news stories start getting old, the media always, always starts reporting on themselves, on how the news gets made ... I didn't like where I was heading ...

...and then I got a job and that was that ...

HT: Melodye

Obama's State Of The Union and word frequency

2011-01-25T08:36:00.001-05:00

In anticipation of President Obama's 2011 State Of The Union speech tonight, and the inevitable bullshit word frequency analysis to follow, I am re-posting my post from last year's SOTU reaction, in hope that maybe, just maybe, some political pundit might be slightly less stupid than they were last year ... sigh .. here's to hope ...

(cropped image from Huffington Post)

It has long been a grand temptation to use simple word frequency* counts to judge a person's mental state. Like Freudian Slips, there is an assumption that this will give us a glimpse into what a person "really" believes and feels, deep inside. This trend came and went within linguistics when digital corpora were first being compiled and analyzed several decades ago. Linguists quickly realized that this was, in fact, a bogus methodology when they discovered that many (most) claims or hypotheses based solely on a person's simple word frequency data were easily refuted upon deeper inspection. Nonetheless, the message of the weakness of this technique never quite reached the outside world and word counts continue to be cited, even by reputable people, as a window into the mind of an individual. Geoff Nunberg recently railed against the practice here: The I's Dont Have It.

The latest victim of this scam is one of the blogging world's most respected statisticians, Nate Silver who performed a word frequency experiment on a variety of U.S. presidential State Of The Union speeches going back to 1962 HERE. I have a lot of respect for Silver, but I believe he's off the mark on this one. Silver leads into his analysis talking about his own pleasant surprise at the fact that the speech demonstrated "an awareness of the difficult situation in which the President now finds himself." Then, he justifies his linguistic analysis by stating that "subjective evaluations of Presidential speeches are notoriously useless. So let's instead attempt something a bit more rigorous, which is a word frequency analysis..." He explains his methodology this way:

To investigate, we'll compare the President's speech to the State of the Union addresses delivered by each president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 in advance of their respective midterm elections. We'll also look at the address that Obama delivered -- not technically a State of the Union -- to the Congress in February, 2009. I've highlighted a total of about 70 buzzwords from these speeches, which are broken down into six categories. The numbers you see below reflect the number of times that each President used term in his State of the Union address.

The comparisons and analysis he reports are bogus and at least as "subjective" as his original intuition. Here's why:

We don't know what causes word frequencies.
We don't know what the effects of word frequencies are.
His sample is skewed.
Silver invented categories that have no cognitive reality.
There are good alternatives.

We don't know what causes word frequencies.

Why does a person use one word more than another? WE. DON'T. KNOW. I understand the simple intuition that this should mean something, but no one actually knows what it means. We simply don't understand the workings of the brain well enough to study the speech production system well enough to answer this question (despite these guys' suspect claims). So we are left with pure intuition (which is generally bad in the cognitive sciences because we don't think the way we think we do). So, again, this methodology is not "objective" as Silver claims (not the simplistic way he implemented it, anyway).

We don't know what the effects of word frequencies are.

The correlate to #1: When a person hears another person use one word more than another, what effect does it have? WE. DON'T. KNOW. Same reasons as above. This remains the realm of intuition and guesswork.

His sample is skewed.
While I understand that to the lay person, the set of SOTU speeches seems like a coherent category to analyze, it is in fact a linguistically incoherent grouping because these sorts of speeches are constructed slowly, painfully, over time, by teams of individuals, NOT spoken extemporaneously by a single individual. Silver could spin this as a positive in the sense that the speeches represent presidential administrations as a whole, but this makes the "evidence" (i.e., word frequency) extremely messy. What factor is driving the frequency of a particular word in a speech? No clue. The variables are numerous and unknown (two bad things for "rigorous" analysis). Having such a messy data set makes interpretation nearly impossible even if we DID know the answers to #1 and #2 (which we don't).

Silver invented categories that have no cognitive reality.

Silver's 70 buzzwords are shoved into six arbitrary categories. Linguists have bee keen on word categories for ... well ... let's say at least 2500 years. This we care about. Deeply. William Labov famously wrote, "If linguistics can be said to be any one thing it is the study of categories" (full text here). More recently, in the last few decades, linguists have expanded their repertoire of tools for analyzing lexical categories using psycholinguistic, cognitive linguistic, and computational linguistic tools and methods. None of these were employed by Silver in determining whether or not his six categories have any coherence or cognitive reality. He just made them up. How is this MORE objective than intuition?

There are alternatives.

Let me be clear. I am a fan of corpus linguistics. Counting words is good (as Nunberg says, and as many linguists say. We like this). But this is just the beginning of a long road of analysis. It must be done in a systematic and sophisticated way to be of any use. There are numerous software tools and methodologies that Silver could have made use of that would have given him a more nuanced analysis. There are whole books that teach people how to do this, such as Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics (just one of many).

Again, I have a lot of respect for Silver and his advanced skill set in stats. I would love to see Silver bring the full weight of his skills to bear on linguist analysis (as I've said, every linguist should study math and stats), but this experiment falls far short of the mark and he should know better.

To a certain extent, this critique is unfair to Silver because he implicitly seemed to be acknowledging many of these deficits. All he wanted to do was get a more objective picture of what the SOTU speech meant and how it fits into a bigger picture. On the other hand, it's a fair critique because he put in a lot of effort and posted the results to his popular and influential blog (yes, I note my blog is neither); one ought not to waste such effort. There is the glaringly negative possibility that his popularity and influence as a statistician will actually serve to further strengthen the popular but wrong notion that simple word counts are somehow meaningful. This would be bad.

*By "simple word frequency counts" I mean counting the words a person uses (say, in a speech) without counting anything else or adding any other data to give the frequency counts meaning and context.

the perils of translation: does und mean well?

2011-01-22T08:33:00.004-05:00

I'm watching the truly powerful 2009 Oscar winning German film The White Ribbon on Netflix. Even after a few minutes it has grabbed me and impressed me with its simplicity and power, in the style of many great films. Hollywood used to make films like this. Films that mattered. Films that taught deep truths about what it means to be human. Films like "Inherit The Wind", "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner", "To Kill A Mockingbird". Now Hollywood makes three Jennifer Anister rom-coms a year and panders to fan boys... but I digress ...

My German is pretty rusty, but the film's dialogue is simple enough (in a good way) for me to catch most of it even without the subtitles, which is exactly the source of the linguistic point I want to discuss. In one early scene, the narrator, a teacher, recounts an incident involving himself* and a student wherein the student was endangering himself, so the teacher demands the student explain his actions. When he fails to get a proper response, he says repeatedly Und? ... Und? ... German und is easily translated as and but the film's translators choose to use the English word well instead.

(screen grab from Netflix)

As a native speaker of English, I can see the reasoning behind well, yet I must say, it's equally plausible to use and in that situation as well, maybe even more so. The use of well in English would suggest a certain formality that the translator felt was proper, but it also makes me, as an English speaker, feel a bit awkward, like I'm being fed an anachronism. Perhaps that's appropriate for the movie, I'm not sure, it just struck me as an interesting linguistic choice. It's a nice example of the beautiful ambiguity of lexical items, really. For example, just a few scenes later the teacher encounters Eva and asks her about who she is and what he's heard about her, namely that she's a new nanny in town, and her response is und, but it is translated as English so:

(screen grab from Netflix)

Again, as a native speaker of English, I can "get" the translation, but still, I'd be perfectly happy with and in both. I've never been a translator and I have much respect for the difficult job professional translators do navigating these treacherous waters. I don't mean to second guess. Rather, it strikes my as an interesting point of discussion.

*why can't I say hisself? Oh, where are you Jeff Runner when I need you!

like wikipedia with a voice?

2011-01-21T11:46:00.003-05:00

It can be difficult to get a feel for what some tech start-ups are going for. This demo of Qwiki at a Tech Crunch event asks us to think of information as an experience. I'm pretty sure the voice is synthesized because of some odd prosody and the weird way Yelp is pronounced (oh, and the unlikelihood that they could pre-record all the possible narration ... yeah, that too). At the end, all I could think of was "it's like Wikipedia with a voice..."

Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

worst word play of the year?

2011-01-19T22:11:00.000-05:00

Your call...

oh snap! daume talkin trash 'bout "stupid" penn tree bank

2011-01-18T19:31:00.003-05:00

Hal Daume at his excellent NLPers blog is wondering aloud about parsing algorithms doing "real" syntax:

One thing that stands in our way, of course, is the stupid Penn Treebank, which was annotated only with very simple transformations (mostly noun phrase movements) and not really "deep" transformations as most Chomskyan linguists would recognize them [emphasis added].

Oh no he di'nt!

[UPDATE: hal responds thoughtfully in the comments and properly corrects my misunderstandings of his post.]

It's certainly fair to say that the Penn Treebank is not annotated for everything. Sure. But show me the perfect resource and I'll let you throw all the stones you want. More to the point, once you get beyond deciding what the basic chunks are (NPs,VPs, PPs, etc), there's little agreement on what is and what is not a "real" syntactic thing. In order to annotate anything above this level, you have to choose a theoretical camp to park your tent in. You have to take sides. ~~Daume is happy to be a Chomskyan. He's taken his side. Good for him.~~

In order to annotate Daume's ~~beloved~~ deep transformations, one must first admit such things exist. I do not. And if Daume started annotating the Penn Treebank with such things, I wouldn't care. I would argue he is wasting his time chasing unicorns.

Daume may believe that Chomskyan theory is "real" syntax, but I do not. Nor do most linguists (if you surveyed all linguists throughout the world, yes I do believe a majority would disagree with the statement I believe in Chomskyan deep structure).

UPDATE: Daume's comments and his responses are well worth reading.

the most difficult linguistics sentence ever?

2011-01-18T08:33:00.000-05:00

Imagine I give you the sentence template that follows:

If speakers omit X to avoid Y, optional Z should be less likely if W.

Question: What X, Y, Z and W could possibly make that sentence EASIER to understand?

For no particular reason other than (that) I love linguistics and will read any free article that catches my fancy, I've been reading Florian Jaeger's Phonological Optimization and Syntactic Variation: The Case of Optional that. Submitted for Proceedings of 32nd BLS (pdf). I have nothing but respect for Jaeger as a linguist* and this is a very interesting paper that I have enjoyed reading**. But flo*** has a knack for producing very difficult to read sentences. Here's the original that produced the template above:

If speakers omit optional that to avoid segmental OCP violations with the immediately preceding or following segment, optional that should be less likely if the segments was to share some articulatory feature with the adjacent segment of that.

It actually got worse WITH context, right? And I read the actual paper, with all kinds o' context. And I still had to re-read that sentence many many times. I'm still not sure I understand it. I may have to whip out PowerPoint, a laser pointer, and a flashlight before I figure it out for sure. Now, I'm prepared to admit that the three pints of BBC Bourbon Barrel Stout at Galaxy Hut may have influenced my critique ...

...but not entirely for the worse. If I ever get around to typing up my awesome and prodigious commentary, it might make a great blog post ... but don't hold your breath. I have a stack of linguistics articles I've read and reviewed over the last 12 months and yet somehow, I just never get around to typing up my truly awesome comments (including in-depth discussion of flo's partner-in-crime Peter Graff's Longitudinal Phonetic Variation in a Closed System -- I got mad comments on that one). Maybe I should have called this blog The Lazy Linguist?

*I've never met the guy so maybe he's a bastard in person, I dunno, I hope not...
**Not in the least because it has some tangential connection to my somewhat defunct dissertation research.
***Hey, he calls himself that on his site...

god awful is an odd phrase

2011-01-16T10:40:00.000-05:00

I used the phrase god awful in a comment at Language Log and it occurs to me that it's an odd little creature. From the OED*:

Pronunciation: /ˌgɒdˈɔːfʊl/
Forms: Also God awful, Godawful.(Show More)
Etymology: < god n. + awful adj.

slang (orig. U.S.).

Terrible; extremely unpleasant. (In quot. 1878 the sense is ‘impressively large’.)

1878 J. H. Beadle Western Wilds xxxvii. 611 Put thirty acres‥into wheat, and went to work with a hurrah in 1874 to make a God-awful crop.
1897 C. M. Flandrau Harvard Episodes 88 Ellis is such a God awful fool.
1930 W. S. Maugham Breadwinner ii. 124 Your affairs are in a god-awful mess.
1946 ‘S. Russell’ To Bed with Grand Music i. 14 Listen to the most godawful programmes on the radio.
1958 R. Graves in Times Lit. Suppl. 15 Aug. p. x/4 The credible and vivid story that any context (red-brick, yellow-brick, or otherwise God-awful) offers.
1959 P. McCutchan Storm South iv. 63, I heard the most God-awful racket above my head.

The meaning is derived from using god as an intensifier like very. Fine, I get this analysis, it makes sense. But is god ever used in any other construction to intensifier a negative quality like awful?

This is a case where corpora are not terribly useful because the instances of god are so frequent, and so frequently NOT in this kind of construction, it's difficult to discover automatically. I could go all qualitative and just read a million phrases with god in them, but that would take a really long time and still have a low probability of success.

HT to the OED for making their site freely available this month! Use name/password trynwoed/trynewoed.

true grit phonological ambiguity

2011-01-15T22:27:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Jeff Bridges' now infamous mumbling performance, the clever folks at College Humor give True Grit a version of the lip reading treatment that Star Trek received not too long ago.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

apologies for the weird embedding, I don't know how to fix it (I just pasted the embed code into the Blogger HTML with no option to adjust size)...and yes, I'll have some more of that woop woop, please...

how distinctive is app store?

2011-01-13T15:57:00.000-05:00

Microsoft is arguing that Apple cannot trademark the term app store because it is a generic term.

"An 'app store' is an 'app store'," Russell Pangborn, Microsoft's associate general counsel, said, according to the BBC. "Like 'shoe store' or 'toy store', it is a generic term that is commonly used by companies, governments and individuals that offer apps."

A commenter at Hacker News begs to differ:

Ngram data shows no usage of "App Store" or "app store" from the time of 1800 to 2008. I was suspicious of this, but using the terms "app,store" separately produced lots of data points. My tentative hypothesis is that Ngram is using data that existed before the App Store went public and thus will not show up in Ngram.

I'm no trademark expert, but the basic idea, as Wikipedia defines it, is distinctiveness: A trademark may be eligible for registration, or registrable, if amongst other things it performs the essential trademark function, and has distinctive character. Registrability can be understood as a continuum, with "inherently distinctive" marks at one end, "generic" and "descriptive" marks with no distinctive character at the other end, and "suggestive" and "arbitrary" marks lying between these two points.

First, I used BYU's Corpus of Contemporary American English and found an instance in 2009 of 'app store" being used to describe Zune's product: Oh, the Zune has an app store, all right. As of today, there are exactly nine programs in the Zune App Store.

A quick google search reveals that it commonly gets applied to non-Apple related products as well: Yep, Amazon Launching Their Own App Store For Android Too.

While it may be the case that Apple introduced the term in 2008, it seems to have expanded to generic use in less than a year and now gets used at least semi-regularly for non-Apple products. I'm not an Apple user myself and my own reading of app store is definitely generic. It does not distinctly mean Apple's product at all, to me. I have no clue if a court would agree.

do you despise eReaders and have tons of extra cash

2011-01-13T11:33:00.002-05:00

...then this is for you: The Penguin Classics Complete Library is a massive box set consisting of nearly every Penguin Classics book ever published and is available on Amazon for only (only!) $13,413.30.

A rundown:

1,082 titles
laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark
700 pounds in weight
828 feet if you stacked them
They arrived in 25 boxes

My only complaint would be that Penguin Classics tend to be crappy books physically.

HT Kottke.

doggie do do at the the HuffPo

2011-01-11T12:07:00.001-05:00

The Huffington Post is resetting the bar for astoundingly stupid science reporting: They report on a dog, Chaser, who has been trained to accurately fetch over 1000 toys by sound of the name and conclude that the dog's abilities, wait for it, place her at an intelligence level equivalent to a three-year-old human child!

My oh my, their view of the cognitive ability of 3 year olds is as depressing as it is profoundly wrong. Sorry, 3 year old humans can do more than make one-to-one correspondences between sounds and objects. They can, for example, recognize that the sound swing can mean an object with a seat attached to ropes OR the action you perform when you move your body back and forth on that thing with the ropes, they can watch TV and follow plot developments, ... sigh, I mean fuck it, it's not worth debunking ...

UPDATE: Sean at Replicated Typo reviews the original research involving Chaser.

Do rich families talk to their kids more than poor families?

2011-01-11T09:22:00.001-05:00

Are Children in professional families talked to three times as much as the children in welfare families? That's the underlying assumption behind a new program at Bellevue hospital designed to coach "poor families on how to talk to their infant children, encouraging more interaction."

At least, that's how the Huffington Post wants you to think about this story:

University of Kansas graduate student Betty Hart and her professor, Todd Risley, wanted to figure out the cause of the education gap between the rich and poor. So, they targeted early education and headed a study that recorded the first three years of 40 infants' lives. The conclusion? Rich families talk to their kids more than poor families.

Pretty impressive, huh? Sounds cutting edge, right? With a little searching I discovered the following:

Betty Hart was a grad student at KU in the 1960s.
The research data for this study was collected in the early 1980s.
The paper publishing these results was published in 1995.

I have no problem with the common sense underlying these notions: talking to babies a lot helps them achieve higher success in academics later in life. Good advice all around, no doubt. But I'm suspicious of several assumptions about the finding of the original paper. From Alix Spiegel:

According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100. "Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says [emphasis added].

Hearing words in your environment and talking to children are two different things and need to be distinguished, as well as child-directed speech. All I have are secondary sources not the 1995 book (Spiegel's article is the most thorough) so I can't tell how the data was coded and what they looked for (did the make the above three distinctions?).

But more to the point is the contemporary rush to paint these old findings as rationale to create new programs aimed at poor parents as if being poor makes your language use wrong somehow. It strikes me as convoluted logic to take a 15 year old book (based on 20 year old data) and decide that poor parents need linguistic intervention. Exactly how much grant money did Dr. Mendelsohn spend on this program? Even if the 3-1 ratio holds true (I suspect it would not under close scrutiny), what other factors might be affecting this?

It struck me that people with basically good intentions took a small amount of science out of context and used it to reinforce class stereotypes and class pressure.

The Psychological Functions of Function Words

2011-01-10T08:33:00.000-05:00

Here is Chung & Pennebaker's 2007 paper on function words which crucially relies on Pennebakers' LWIC data: The Psychological Functions of Function Words (pdf). I have long felt that function words have been wrongly ignored by computational linguists and SEO specialists. While the use of stop lists have sped up processing time considerably, they have also wiped out huge amounts of semantically meaningful data. Nonetheless, I also feel the Pennebaker's LWIC corpus is not as transparent or as comprehensive as I would prefer it to be.

biggest linguistics story of 2010?

2011-01-08T21:32:00.000-05:00

I have nothing but respect and admiration for Erin McKean, CEO and Co-Founder of the awesome Wordnik project as well as the person who has given by far the single greatest lingo-TED-talk ever; nonetheless, I take exception to her most recent column in the Boston Globe titled The year in language which is an article about the best and worst language stories of 2010. She notes many worthy events, yet...

With no offense meant, I can say that I was shocked, SHOCKED! to discover that no mention whatsoever was made of what I consider to be the single most important and shocking linguistics related story of 2010: the revelation that Harvard's Marc Hauser fabricated data regarding rule learning by monkeys. For years, Hauser has posed as a giant in the Chomsky camp, and created an ivy-league cottage industry based on his research. 2010's revelations of his still-unclear-yet-nonetheless-obvious-forgery is a shock-wave whose full power and ramifications have yet to be fully understood. Plus, it was the Boston Globe itself, the paper Erin publishes in, that broke the original story.

Language Log's extensive discussions of the Hauser story can be found here.

replace QWERTY with little circles?

2011-01-08T13:34:00.000-05:00

Android users can look forward to a new typing layout specifically designed for one handed, hand-held device typing by 8pen. There have long been alternatives to the traditional QWERTY layout, but this one replaces keys with hand motion, so rather than landing your finger on the letter you want to type (the conceptual foundation of most keyboard concepts) this one rests on the idea that you make little circles on the screen while different letters are accessed.

In the words of the horse from Ren and Stimpy, no sir, I don't like it. Why not?

While inefficient and clumsy, the classic idea of touching the letter you want is fundamentally natural and clear. Any child or lazy adult can grasp it immediately. The little circles idea creates an artificial and unnatural interface that puts you multiple steps away from what you want. I'm not trying to make circles, I'm trying to type a frikkin k. I'm sure with practice anyone could get good at this, but I don't wanna practice typing for frik's sake! That's why I've been a clumsy hunt and pecker for 30 years with the damned QWERTY. I could have practiced typing on this damn thing also, but I didn't for the same reason I'm not gonna practice the little circles: I'm lazy. But at least with keys I can just touch the letter I want and get it. It's clear and obvious. I'm sure the little circles would drive me mad.

adults process language in a baby way!

2011-01-07T12:24:00.000-05:00

Do babies process language in a "grown-up" way? First, read this from UCSD:

Babies, even those too young to talk, can understand many of the words that adults are saying – and their brains process them in a grown-up way.

Combining the cutting-edge technologies of MRI and MEG, scientists at the University of California, San Diego show that babies just over a year old process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time. Moreover, the researchers found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning [emphasis added].

It certainly is an interesting finding to discover that infant and adult lexical processing may be similar, but why couch it in asymmetrical phrasing? Given the facts as this press release states them, could we equally as well say that adults process language in a baby way? This wouldn't get any press attention, though, would it. Or worse, it would be mocked. The author of the press release, Debra Kain, is referred to as a spokesperson for the UCSD Medical Center in this article. But it's not clear she consulted Jeff Elmen, a very well respected cognitive scientist who participated in the research. I'm not sure how comfortable he would have been with the somewhat excitable language.

annals of unnecessary censorship, literary canon edition

2011-01-06T11:35:00.001-05:00

Upcoming NewSouth 'Huck Finn' Eliminates the 'N' Word.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

[...]

"What he suggested," said La Rosa, "was that there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."

I'm curious about this notion of replacement as an "option" for two reasons. First, it reminds me of Ted Turner's infamous and ill-fated 1980s colorization project whereby he went back and artificially colorized black and white movies. As I recall, Turner also spoke of it as an "option", but it failed miserably as a cultural movement. Second, now that eReaders are becoming commonplace I wonder if publishers will begin to offer sanitized versions of books as an option. I don't have an eReader, so maybe this is already available, but I could imagine a filter that you click on and magically Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer becomes a weirdly different novel.

HT kottke

jobs for linguists

2011-01-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

As the economy slowly starts to wake, I hope and expect to see more jobs like this one popping up where general linguistics skills are being sought by innovative tech companies (these were a dime a dozen in the glory days of the tech boom 90s). Were I a bit younger, and less well-payed, I'd probably consider applying myself.

We are seeking a Linguist interested in joining a rapidly growing organization. The Linguist will work closely with our NLP Team in researching and developing lexica and grammars specific to various languages (“Language Packs”) that will be used for various NLP tasks. She/he will be expected to
contribute substantive insight/action with regard to developing language packs and must have a keen eye for understanding the end-user experience.

Specific responsibilities include:
- Research specific languages for their lexical, morphological, and
grammatical structures
- Develop original lexicons and reformat acquired lexicons
- Create grammatical rules using the research done above or other sources
- Analyze results from the system for mistakes and plan for improvement
- Willingness to focus research and development of Language Packs on
meeting the end-user’s needs

If you're a linguist interested in a non-academic career, you could do worse than apply here.

And for the record, I have no association with this company, have never worked for them, get nothing from posting this, but I do know one of their employees (we went to grad school together).

the germans fear my language too, muahahaha

2011-01-04T10:53:00.000-05:00

It's a mighty era to be a native speaker of English. It seems the world fears my language and is instituting fruitless policies to protect their languages against my own. First the Chinese banned English words and phrases. Now, the Germans are getting on the banning bandwagon:

Germany's Transport Minister claimed to have struck an important blow for the preservation of the German language yesterday after enforcing a strict ban on the use of all English words and phrases within his ministry.

Peter Ramsauer stopped his staff from using more than 150 English words and expressions that have crept into everyday German shortly after being appointed in late 2009.

His aim, which was backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, was to defend his language against the spread of "Denglish" – the corruption of German with words such as "handy" for mobile phone and other expressions including "babysitten" and "downloaden". As a result, words such as "laptop", "ticket" and "meeting" are verboten in Mr Ramsauer's ministry. Instead, staff must use their German equivalents: "Klapprechner", "Fahrschein" and "Besprechung" as well as many other common English words that the minister has translated back into German.

naive bayes knows restaurants better than 5,000 mechanical turks

2011-01-04T10:28:00.002-05:00

Yelp recently sponsored a bake-off between a Naive Bayes classifier and the online crowd-sourcing site Mechanical Turk. The task was classifying web sites according to their business category (i.e., is it a restaurant or a doctors office?). The classifier beat the turkers handily:

Money quote:
In almost every case, the algorithm, which was trained on a pool of 12 million user-submitted Yelp reviews, correctly identified the category of a business a third more often than the humans. In the automotive category, the computer was twice as likely as the assembled masses to correctly identify a business.

There are a variety of qualifications (why did 99% of Turkers who applied for the task fail the basic test? ESL issues perhaps?). But it's an interesting result.

HT kdnuggets

how we hear ourselves speak

2011-01-03T14:13:00.000-05:00

Science Daily has a nice article on new neurolinguistic research out of Cal linking auditory and speech processes:

"We used to think that the human auditory system is mostly suppressed during speech, but we found closely knit patches of cortex with very different sensitivities to our own speech that paint a more complicated picture," said Adeen Flinker, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study.

"We found evidence of millions of neurons firing together every time you hear a sound right next to millions of neurons ignoring external sounds but firing together every time you speak," Flinker added. "Such a mosaic of responses could play an important role in how we are able to distinguish our own speech from that of others."

HT Linguistic News Feeds

the evolution of journalistic quotes

2011-01-03T10:42:00.000-05:00

They're getting shorter:

According to a new article in the academic journal Journalism Studies by David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier, both professors at the University of Nevada, newspaper quotations evolved in much the same way as TV sound bites. By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.

(HT Daily Dish)

soccer vs. football

2010-12-30T14:33:00.002-05:00

Too late for The World Cup, but thanks to Stan Carey at Sentence First, I only just now discovered that we Yanks are not the only English speakers who use soccer to refer to, ya know, that game where you can't touch the ball with your hands (tennis? no... the one that Ronaldo plays). In fact, there are about 74 million OTHER English speakers in this world who use soccer to refer to Ronaldo's game too. Add the USA's 308 million, and it is almost certainly the case that more English speakers use soccer than football. With that, I say thppppt to the English...

(image from Wikipedia)

UPDATE [3:38PM eastern]: reader vp points out the following passage from the same Wikipedia article the image came from: several official publications of the English Football Association have the word "soccer" in the title. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski write that soccer was the most common name for the game in Britain from the 1890s until the 1970s, and suggest that the decline of the word soccer in the UK, and the incorrect perception that it is an Americanism, were linked to awareness of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

plagiarism and n-grams

2010-12-30T13:33:00.001-05:00

Big media plagiarism is once again in the news as ESPN has suspended an on-air host for plagiarizing three sentences from a newspaper columnist. The on air host has admitted the plagiarism*, issued an apology, and asked for forgiveness.

The multiple and confusing ethical standards for plagiarism ~~has~~ have been the subject of of several LL posts (recently here) and this led me to wonder about what counts as plagiarism in the first place. Clearly a three sentence, 45 word passage, almost word for word identical with another, in the same semantic domain with the same referents, is a case of plagiarism. But what about a 20 word passage? 10 word? 4 word**?

Many short phrases are highly frequent, right? You couldn't felicitously accuse me of plagiarism for using the phrase "I am going..." could you? Even though, there can be no doubt, that someone else before me used it first. Yes, I know you can find guidelines for plagiarism in college student handbooks and such. I dealt with those for years when I taught college writing courses (and I recall flunking at least three students for plagiarism, but those were whole papers, really stupid stuff).

But I wonder, now that we have a 500 million word corpus available to us, couldn't we simply compare all n-grams to discover how likely it is that any given 5-gram is repeated? I'd prefer to do this up to 20-gram and such, but wouldn't we predict that there comes a point at which the likelihood that a particular phrase was plagiarized (given that we had found two alike) would be based solely on the general likelihood that n-grams of that size are repeated. The situation would be this: you discover that a particular 11 word passage has an identical twin from 2 years ago. Without bothering to look into whether or not the author had access to the previous work, you simply look up the likelihood that any 11-gram passage is repeated and discover that there is a 0.0002% chance that a phrase that long will be repeated.

With some effort, you could then derive predictions for near identical passages (using WordNet and similar resources)....

..just thinking out loud...

*I am ignorant of the role ESPN's producers play in the writing of on air speeches, but the quote seems clearly to have been written on a teleprompter at the time of speaking, which means someone else was involved, even if unwittingly. Nonetheless, the host is taking the fall willingly.

**Excluding obviously famous phrases like Ich bin ein Berliner.

does asbestos really mean 'unquenchable'?

2010-12-30T11:12:00.002-05:00

Yes, at least etymologically. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its etymology this way:
...from O.Fr. abeste, from L. asbestos "quicklime" (which "burns" when cold water is poured on it), from Gk. asbestos, lit. "inextinguishable," from a- "not" + sbestos, verbal adj. from sbennynai "to quench," from PIE base *(s)gwes- "to quench, extinguish" (cf. Lith. gestu "to go out," O.C.S. gaso, Hittite kishtari "is being put out") (emphasis added).

Like people, every word has lived its own peculiar and unique life. Riffing on my post below regarding words that have the opposite meaning of their etymology, my friend Andy (who did graduate work in Classics, and hence, actually reads Greek) challenged me to help him understand why the word asbestos, whose etymology literally means 'unquenchable' is used today to mean a substance that cannot burn.

With some Googling, I found this (PDF): "First mention of asbestos appeared in the Greek text On Stones, written by Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s students. Theophrastus referred to a substance that resembled rotten wood and burned (right) without being harmed when doused with oil."

So, Ol' Theophrastus kept pouring oil onto this stuff, but it never burnt, so he kept pouring, but the stuff was never quenched by oil/fire. Hence, it was unquenchable. That's my story and I'm sticking to it (for now).

Andy did some follow-up of his own and provides the following:
Yes, that's one of the more likely explanations. In my research I came across the use of asbestos as permanent wicks in lamps, but never noted the bit about being unquenchable with oil. That Theophrastos citation really belongs in the dictionary entry below, as it's the only cite that explains the meaning under A. The lexicon below is massively comprehensive (if you couldn't tell) so it's odd they missed Theo.

The other possible explanation is II. or "unslaked lime", as quick lime burns underwater. This was a key component in later "Greek fire", but so far I haven't been able to find any ancient source that cites an unquenchable substance (Greek Fire dates to 500 AD, white phosphorus, which also burns underwater, dates to 1600 AD, and sodium, which explodes on contact with water, dates to 1800 AD).

If I had the time and language skill I used to have I would search my CD of all Greek text up to 600 AD for cites of asbestos and then comb thru them, but that would be a day's worth of work I'm pleased that we got close to the meaning in online research and I'm not sure that looking up every instance of asbestos would change anything.

Andy also provided the following reference

ἄσβεστος , ον, also η, ον Il.16.123:—

A. unquenchable, inextinguishable, “φλόξ” Il. l. c.; not quenched, “πῦρ ἄ.” D.H.3.67, Plu.Num.9; “κλέος” Od.4.584; “γέλως” Il.1.599; “βοή” 11.50; “ἐργμάτων ἀκτὶς καλῶν ἄ. αἰεί” Pi.I.4(3).42; ἄ. πόρος ὠκεανοῦ ocean's ceaseless flow, A.Pr.532 (lyr.); πῦρ, of hell, Ev.Marc.9.43.

II. as Subst., ἄσβεστος (sc. τίτανος), h(, unslaked lime, Dsc.5.115, Plu.Sert.17, Eum.16; “ἄ. κονία” Lyc. ap. Orib.8.25.16.

2. a mineral or gem, Plin.HN37.146. ἀσβεστώδης: tofus, Gloss.

Henry George Liddell. Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1940.

etymologists , unite!

2010-12-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

A buddy wrote me an interesting question (to which I did not have an answer):

It's been driving me crazy, is there a term of art for when the etymological root of a word is the opposite of the word's modern meaning? For example, asbestos means "an unquenchable fire"; philander means "a lover of men" etc. Cheers, A.,

Anyone know this?

dialects map

2010-12-29T09:34:00.001-05:00

Extremely detailed North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns. The site could use a bit of a web re-design ... looks circa 1999. Anyone care to offer free web design help to clean up this otherwise useful resource a little?

not any or not one??

2010-12-28T13:52:00.001-05:00

The NYTs recent The Number of None grammar blog post brings up an interesting question: is none semantically closer to not any or not one? And what should its morphosyntactic agreement be, singular or plural?

The Times takes the not any, plural position, but I am inclined to disagree based on my intuition about substitution. Below are the two sentences the Times uses to illustrate:

None of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
None of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

Now, with the substitutions and my personal acceptability rating (where * means mildly unacceptable/not sure and ** means completely unacceptable).

Not one of the interim employers or temporary agencies has contributed to a 401(k)
Not one of the works has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
**Not any of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
**Not any of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
Not one of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k)
Not one of the works have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
**Not any of the interim employers or temporary agencies has contributed to a 401(k)
**Not any of the works has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

The above ratings suggest that I make no distinction in acceptability between none has and none have. But wait, there's more. Let's remove the lengthy PP and see how this pans out:

*Not one of them has contributed to a 401(k)
*Not one of them has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
**Not any of them have contributed to a 401(k)
**Not any of them have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
Not one of them have contributed to a 401(k)
Not one of them have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
**Not any of them has contributed to a 401(k)
**Not any of them has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

I seem to slightly prefer the singular reading when the word none is close to the verb but with a plural noun heading the PP. But this is not true if we delete the PP altogether:

Not one has contributed to a 401(k)
Not one has gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.
*Not one have contributed to a 401(k)
*Not one have gained a foothold in the seasonal repertory.

It would appear I have an incoherent grammar (surely this is true as I believe all grammars are, in some way, incoherent. As Sapir said, all grammars leak). But, there's at least one other factor muddying the linguistic waters. The fact that one also acts a pronoun as in one does one's duty. When acting as a pronoun, it takes 2nd pers, SG agreement, as in one has to do one's duty (think he has to do his duty), not *one have to do one's duty. It may be that this pronoun agreement is interfering with my reading when one occurs right next to the verb. Also, I did this pretty fast, so I wouldn't be surprised if I change my mind by COB...

Of course, how could I resist:

I believe I got the full paradigm:

not one of them has
not one of them have
not any of them has
not any of them have
none of them has
none of them have
none has
none have

It appears as though none have had a hell of a start to the ~~18th~~ 19th Century, but got killed off along with the Buffalo.

refudiate, the word that won't die

2010-12-28T11:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks in no small measure to the Oxford University Press naming refudiate its Word Of The Year plus The Daily Dish rekindling its favorite topic, we have a new round of he-said-she-said to deal with. Made famous by Sarah Palin this past summer (see Liberman's original post here, and others here), it is yet again the object of speculation as to why Palin used the form to begin with.

Palin herself poured fuel on this fire two days ago by tweeting that it was a typo. Liberman thinks that explanation didn't hold water the first time around because she first said it aloud on teevee: the original example [on teevee] wasn't a slip of the tongue, but a symptom of the fact that Ms. Palin had a blend of repudiate and refute as a well-established entry in her mental lexicon [note added].

Why the fuss? There's nothing particularly interesting or telling about the linguistic blending of repudiate and refute. Everyone does this kind of thing now and again and sometimes it sticks. Some people like to beat up on public figures any time they can, so something like this is a target. But the more serious speculation is that the Palin Camp's public responses expose something important about Sarah Palin's inner circle and consultation. I'll leave it to the political pundits to fight that one out.

For now,

the linguistics of brand names

2010-12-28T09:50:00.001-05:00

The Neurocritic reviews evidence for the whopping increase in drug brand names beginning with the letters z and x starting in 1986 and quotes the conclusion of the study's authors:

Reflecting their infrequent occurrence in English words, x and z count for 8 and 10 points in Scrabble, the highest values (along with j and q) in the game. So names that contain them are likely to seem special and be memorable. “If you meet them in running text, they stand out,” is the way one industry insider explained. Generally, they are also easy to pronounce.

The last point about being easy to pronounce is basically nonesense, so forgive them that, but their basic point that infrequent sounds are more memorable is basically a restatement of Zipf's Law and may have some truth to it.

I can tell you this, there are entire companies that charge high fees to help manufacturers develop brand names (see here for a discussion of what brand name developers do). I worked at one of them ever so briefly and I found there to be a mix of legitimate linguistics and voodoo linguistics mixed together in the "research" they prepared for their customers. I also found a resistance to serious linguistics for two reasons: 1) the customers didn't like science (I'm not joking; this was a serious obstacle) and 2) serious linguistics took too long and didn't come to firm conclusions. Typically, we were asked to initiate, perform, and complete linguistic research on brand names in a matter of weeks.

Ultimately, though, it was my conclusion that a product's name simply was not that crucial to its success, which teetered on the manufacturers overall marketing strategy more than the name. Think about Google vs. Microsoft. So, the rise in z and x named drug products is a fad based more in the board room than in the marketplace.

non-linguistic CAPTCHA

2010-12-28T09:07:00.000-05:00

David Bradley, writing at sciencetech, reports on a new face-based CAPTCHA process, quoting the team that created it, "Unlike a text-based CAPTCHA, a major benefit of the proposed image-based face detection CAPTCHA is that it does not have any language barriers..."

I guess it never really occurred to me that there would be language barriers in CAPTCHAs because so many of the strings are in fact nonesense words, but I guess language specific phonotactics are helpful (often the identity of a single letter is quite ambiguous).

history of writing tech

2010-12-27T15:48:00.000-05:00

American Scientist has a review of a new book on the history of writing technologies with a focus on how computers fit in. A BETTER PENCIL: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron.

Money quote:

Will this shift in the technology of writing and reading be a positive development in human culture? Will it promote literacy, or impair it? Baron takes a moderate position on these questions. On the one hand, he acknowledges that the computer offers remarkable opportunities for self-expression and communication (at least for those of us in the wealthier parts of the world). Suddenly, we can all be published authors, and we all have access to the writings—or if nothing else the Twitterings—of millions of other authors. On the other hand, much of what these new channels of communication bring us is mere noise and distraction, and we may lose touch with more serious kinds of reading and writing. (Another recent book—The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr—argues this point strenuously.) Baron remarks: “That position incorrectly assumes that when we’re not online we throw ourselves into high-culture mode, reading Tolstoi spelled with an i and writing sestinas and villanelles instead of shopping lists.”

another lingo toy...

2010-12-27T11:51:00.000-05:00

I love free online lingo toys like BYU's Corpora and Google's Ngram Viewer and now there's a new one: The Human Speechome Project from MIT" provides a look into the most complete record of a single child’s speech development ever created. The data has been organized to show the age of the child when he spoke each of his first 400 words." It's profiled in Forbes here. And they provide a nifty interactive graph to sort the data:

true grit

2010-12-26T09:00:00.007-05:00

I posted recently about the phrase "bust a cap" occurring in the original 1969 John Wayne movie True Grit. I got a chance to see the new Coen Bros version and my reactions are worth airing...or not, you decide...

First, it turns out the phrase true grit has a storied history in the history of English letters:

But this review is destined to be of the non-linguistic kind...

I also had the chance to re-watch the original John Wayne version just a couple days before watching the new one. While it may be the case that this is a bit unfair because it means the recent version is asked to live up to the original is some ways, nonetheless, it is instructive (insofar as it does NOT). I hereby forgive the Coen Bros for not watching the original again in preparation for their version. Surely this would have scuttled their project.

Let me make it clear that the individual performances in the Coen Bros movie alone make it worth watching. Each actor is given great opportunity to breath life into their character and I respect the Coen Bros for allowing that. They are truly dedicated to the fine craft of acting and I enjoyed watching their version of True Grit. Frankly, I could watch Jeff Bridges eat oatmeal and be amazed at how weird and wonderfully he did it.

Nonetheless, my primary complaint is devastating: the new Coen Bros version lacks the basic narrative structure and emotional depth that made the original so fundamentally enjoyable and satisfying. For the record, I have never read the novel, so I have no clue what it says and the Coen Bros based their new version entirely on that. However, I can say that one of the most deeply satisfying elements of the John Wayne movie is the development of the relationships that evolve between the child Mattie Ross, the drunken but courageous Rooster Cogburn, and the goofy, but basically decent La Boeuf. Throughout the original movie, those three characters find a way to forge a sort of dysfunctional, yet basically good and meaningful family unit between them. This family unit is completely absent from the new version. And I missed it.

One of the most touching and important moments of the original movie involves Rooster finally opening up to Mattie about his past and his wife and son while the two sit and wait for Ned Pepper's gang to arrive. This scene reveals Rooster's humanity and deeply emotional character. It is this scene that helps forge a familial bond, almost like an uncle/niece relationship, between Rooster and Mattie. And this deep relationship is played out for the rest of the movie. Developing this scene during a crucial moment of patience and waiting is pure narrative brilliance. Yet, the Coen Bros took this and turned it into camp and parody. The lines about his wife and son are basically thrown away in a drunken mumbling as his horse barely manages to contain his heavy frame while they trod along meaninglessly. What should be a deeply emotional connection forged in a tense moment of expectation becomes slapstick and meaningless. Why throw this away?

I would need a copy of the new film to point out all of the moments lacking narrative continuity, but here are a few to suffice:

Late in both movies, Mattie stumbles upon her nemesis Tom Chaney while gathering water from a river. In the original film, the proximity of Ned Pepper's gang is made clear and ominous. The likelihood that she would find trouble while going for water is made plain. But in the new version, it plays out like some wildly random coincidence. The ending of both movies requires these events to take place, but the original movie at least gives us some reasons behind the events, not just chaos and random nothingness.

Ned Pepper is a critical character in the story. In the original movie, the truly great actor Robert Duvall is given the chance to give the man some decency and honor. He is a killer, yes, but he also saves Mattie's life, despite claiming to be willing to end it. In fact, it is Ned Pepper, more than anyone else (in the original), who keeps Mattie alive (until the snake-hole scene at least). Robert Duvall was given the opportunity to create a Ned Pepper who is full and complex. In the Coen Bros version the actor Barry Pepper (seriously, no joke, that's his name, weird right?) is barely a grubby and dirty (really seriously dirty, nasty dirty, disgustingly dirty...) killer. The pathos of Ned Pepper is gone.

By far, the most iconic moment of the original movie is the scene where Rooster takes the reigns of his horse in his mouth and single handedly draws down against four armed opponents. This is one of the greatest moments of American Western lore, involving the single greatest actor of American Western mythology. It is truly a moment of cinematic greatness. Leading up to this, Rooster describes a previous moment in his storied life much like this (earlier in both films) and it forms a crucial part of his legend and character. When the ultimate moment arrives in the original version, it is a moment of destiny, built up by the dialogue and scenes that have come before it. But in the Coen Bros version, the whole raison d'etre has been obscured by mumbling and misdirection. It's almost as if this were every bit as random as everything else that came before it. You may well argue that randomeness and chaos is in fact the Coen Bros' raison d'etre, and I can't argue against that. Fair enough. But then, why bother making a movie about a story for which destiny and courage is so crucial a factor? Without the great inevitable showdown of Rooster's grit against the despots' manpower, well, why make this movie at all? If you believe in pure chaos, fine, make No Country For Old Men over and over, got it. That makes sense. That's coherent. But why take this novel and make a movie? If your primary goal as movie makers is to take previous material well loved by the public and trash it for your own philosophical gain, that's just pure douchebaggery, so screw you Joel and Ethan.

Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics

2010-12-25T12:02:00.000-05:00

Trey Jones* at Speculative Grammarian invites y'all to play his cute, and yet somewhat depressing, game: Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics.

As a service to our young and impressionable readers who are considering pursuing a career in linguistics, Speculative Grammarian is pleased to provide the following Gedankenexperiment to help you understand the possibilities and consequences of doing so. For our old and bitter readers who are too far along in their careers to have any real hope of changing the eventual outcome, we provide the following as a cruel reminder of what might have been.

Let the adventure begin...

*hehe, he used to work at Cycorp, hehe...

bustin' a cap

2010-12-23T08:33:00.002-05:00

Watching the original True Grit on teevee and what do I hear? Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) says something to the effect "I ain't never busted a cap in no girl before." I thought only contemporary gansta movies and rap lyrics used that phrase (and yes, I did find some examples of bust(-ed) a cap using the Ngram Viewer).

my bad, global edition

2010-12-22T09:23:00.000-05:00

Manute Bol is often credited with coining the phrase my bad (see here and here, or here for alternate hypotheses). It has apparently made the jump, in some way, to international usage, it's just not clear to me how.

While watching The Girl Who played with Fire again last night, I noticed Lisbeth says something that is translated as my bad, but what she actually says is in Swedish, of course.

(screen shot from Netflix)

To my non-Swedish speaking ears, it sounds like she says mitt viel, which would mean something closer to my very, if Google translate is any help. Google translates my bad into Swedish as mitt dåliga (dåliga appears to be a literal translation of bad). I'm pretty sure that's not what she said, but I'd have to re-listen to be sure.

So, the linguistic questions are these:

What does she say in Swedish?
What is the history of the Swedish phrase?
Is my bad the best English translation (given its history in slang and in pop culture)?

i know your email address...so what?

2010-12-21T12:59:00.000-05:00

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing makes the bold claim that there's no compelling evidence that obscuring your email address online using techniques like john DOT smith at host DOT com actually reduces the amount of spam you recieve. As long as his spam filters are catching the spam effectively, he doesn't mind sharing his email address with the world.

Are you willing to follow his lead?

half a million language deaths?

2010-12-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

Lera Boroditsky's recent concluding statement in The Economist's debate about how language shapes thought states "At the moment we have good linguistic descriptions of only about 10% of the world's existing languages (and we know even less about the half a million or so languages that have existed in the past) (emphasis added).

In my previous post on language death here, I used the number 100,000 to estimate how many languages have previously existed and related it favorably to David Crystal's 64,000 to 140,000 reasonable guesstimate. I'm just curious to know where Boroditsky came up with the half million number? I've managed to come up with a few references to this 500,000 number, but they claim it's a "radical estimate" (e.g., see here).

My hunch is that this is yet another example of Boroditsky's profound-problem. She has a tendency to call modest results profound when they are not. She is, I suspect, a tad prone to hyperbole.

language and thought votes

2010-12-20T16:17:00.000-05:00

On the eve of the conclusion to Mark Liberman and Lera Boroditsky's debate at The Economist, there are two vote totals that are interesting to compare.

The obvious one is the lopsided results so far on the main question: Do you agree with the motion? Here, Boroditsky has a 77%-23% advantage. However, if you mouse-over each day's vote, it tells you how many yes's have switched to no and vice versa. The totals there are the near exact opposite: by a 5-1 margin yes's have switched to no. You are free to interpret this as you wish.

Unfortunately I don't see any raw totals for the number of people voting, so it's anyone's guess what proportion of votes the 6 changes represent (likely, a very small percentage).

digg's c**ktail

2010-12-20T12:01:00.002-05:00

[UPDATE below)

I couldn't help but notice a story on Digg: Images of alcoholic drinks under the microscope from vodka c**ktails to pina colada. I checked the original Daily Mail story and saw that the word cocktail was not censored. I looked for other instances of cocktail on Digg's site and found that all instances look censored, except when the string c-o-c-k occurs in a user name, as the image below demonstrates:

This appears to be a candidate for unnecessary censorship. I sent an email to Digg asking them if this is intentional censorship or an inside joke within the site. I'll report any response (don't hold your breath).

[UPDATE: 3:01 Eastern)

Digg support did in fact reply, noting that it was a function of a profanity filter that can be turned off:

Hello ,
You see that because you have the profanity filter enabled. To disable it just log in and go to:
http://digg.com/settings/preferences
--Digg Support

the linguistics of the simpsons

2010-12-19T20:21:00.001-05:00

The magnificent and admiral Snowclone X is the Y of Z made a surprise and instructive appearance on The Simpsons tonight*:

Marge -- Don't worry Lisa, you could still go to McGill, it's the Harvard of Canada.
Lisa --Anything that is the something of the something isn't the anything of anything...

Too true, Lisa, too true. It's never good to be the shadow of something else.

*This appears to have been a repeat of the 10-10-2010 episode MoneyBART (a nice allusion to Moneyball, btw).

ngram roundup

2010-12-19T10:18:00.000-05:00

It's not difficult to find glee and excitement surrounding Google's new Ngram Viewer. Hyperbolic praise is whirling around the innerwebz like mad. As an antidote and a nod to the role skepticism should play in our contemporary society, I present a brief round up of criticisms:

Geoffrey Nunberg:
...there are still a fair number of misdated works, and there's no way to restrict a query by genre or topic. But in the end, the most important consequence of the Science paper, and of allowing public access to the data, is that it puts "culturomics" into conversational play.

Mark Davies:
Google Books can't use wildcards to search for parts of words. For example, try searching for freak* out (all forms: freak_, freaked, freaking, etc) or even a simple search like teenager* ... if Google Books doesn't know about part of speech tags or variant forms of a word, then how can it look at change in grammar? ... To use collocates with Google Books, you would have to manually download thousands or millions of hits to your hard drive, and then use another program to look for and categorize the collocates.

Mark Liberman:
The Science paper says that "Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture". But as long as the historical text corpus itself remains behind a veil at Google Books, then "culturomics" will be restricted to a very small corner of that definition, unless and until the scholarly community can reproduce an open version of the underlying collection of historical texts.

David Crystal:
...this is just a collection of books - no newspapers, magazines, advertisements, or other orthographic places where culture resides. No websites, blogs, social networking sites. No spoken language, of course, so over 90 percent of the daily linguistic usage of the world isn't here...The approach, in other words, shows trends but can't interpret or explain them. It can't handle ambiguity or idiomaticity..

The Binder Blog:
The value of the Ngrams Viewer rests on a bold conceit: that the number of times a word is used at certain periods of time has some kind of relationship to the culture of the time. For example, the fact that the word “slavery” peaks around 1860 suggests that people in 1860 had a lot to say about slavery. Another spike around the 1970s meshes nicely with the Civil Rights Movement. Well, that’s sort of interesting. However, I didn’t need ngrams to tell me that a lot of people were writing about slavery in 1860. These data are broad but not deep, which makes them relatively useless to most humanities majors interested in intensive study.

The one positive comment that I think bears repeating is the role this fun little tool might play is sparking the imagination of young students interested in the role technology can play in the humanities.

Geoffrey Nunberg:

Whatever misgivings scholars may have about the larger enterprise, the data will be a lot of fun to play around with. And for some—especially students, I imagine—it will be a kind of gateway drug that leads to more-serious involvement in quantitative research.

how NOT to interpret ngrams

2010-12-18T09:19:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has predictably misunderstood the value of Google's Ngram Viewer. He spent all day yesterday posting trite and simplistic mis-interpretations of the data. For example,

the concept of ideology is a relatively recent one because the word ideology has become more frequent recently (this is almost certainly false).
Jesus "wins" (his word, not mine) against the Beatles because the word Jesus is more frequent.

I like the Ngram Viewer, but simply plotting the frequency of words against each other to determine something about culture or concepts is a very weak technique that leads to massive mis-interpretations, as we've seen recently with things like counting the number of times President Obama uses pronouns in his speeches. I discussed the failings of simple word counts as a technique here. To sum up,

We don't know what causes word frequencies.
We don't know what the effects of word frequencies are.
There are good alternatives.

magical machine translation

2010-12-17T13:59:00.000-05:00

This is un-fucking-believable:

The future has arrived.

HT kottke

ngram or n-gram?

2010-12-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

The hottest story of the day is clearly Google's Ngram Viewer. It's all over blogs, twitter and even the MSM. But why did Google call it the Ngram Viewer and not the N-gram Viewer?

The hyphenated form is more common in the NLP industry and in general search results (by a 10-1 margin at that). Nunberg's LL post and Languagehat's post both prefer n-gram when speaking about the tokens themselves and only use Ngram when referencing Google's named product. Even Google's own people used n-gram in a blog post here.

You gotta wonder what kind of branding process Google went through to decide on ngram (they are notoriously conscious about that kind of thing). The popularity of this story also demonstrates how much more media savvy Google is because Microsoft has almost exactly the same tool, but no one knows about it. See here. The difference is that Microsoft didn't link its use to studying culture and history and give us a nifty online tool to play with, making it more dull sounding than perhaps it otherwise would.

Also, note Microsoft uses N-gram ... frikkin Microsoft.

google has a huge tool

2010-12-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

NPR ran a story today called Google Book Tool Tracks Cultural Change With Words. It's about "the biggest collection of words ever assembled*", Google's 500 billion word corpus is drawn from the books they've scanned, but here's the catch: many of those books are copywrited, so what Google did is pull a trick that goes back to the very beginnings of computational linguistics, they present the words as an unordered set, or bag o' words:

Many of these books are covered by copyright, and publishers aren't letting people read them online. But the new database gets around that problem: It's just a collection of words and phrases, stripped of all context except the date in which they appeared.

I first learned about this technique back in 1999 in an intro to computational linguistics course (bit of trivia: we we're using an incomplete pre-print of Martin and Jurafsky; as I recall, the discourse chapter was composed entirely of one page that read 21 Computational Discourse write something here...) and I remember being appalled at its crass simplicity. I mean, how dare those idiot engineers reduce language down to simple lists of words. How dare they try to use simple word lists to discover important facts about language and devise important linguistic tools.

It took less than a week for me to change my tune. The fact is, the bag o' words technique is remarkably powerful and useful. No, it doesn't solve all problems in one swoop, but it solves a hell of a lot more than I could possibly predict as a naive 2nd year linguistics grad student. For example:

Irregular verbs are used as a model of grammatical evolution. For each verb, researchers plotted the usage frequency of its irregular form in red ("thrived"), and the usage frequency of its regular past-tense form in blue ("throve/thriven"). Virtually all irregular verbs are found from time to time used in a regular form, but those used more often tend to be used in a regular way more rarely.

Google labs lets you play with its tool here (hehe).

*Not sure where this claim originated, but Google has already released a 1 trillion word corpus via LDC, the Web 1T 5-gram Version 1.

2010-12-16T09:54:00.000-05:00

From Stephen Fry's twitter feed:

Just had an fMRI scan at UCL (part of BBC doc on language I'm making). Had to play Just A Minute while being scanned. Fun.

A BBC documentary about language? Ugh...I don't think even the talents of Stephen Fry can save that one.

harvard jumps the linguistic shark

2010-12-15T11:18:00.000-05:00

Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby adds to the mountain of pseudo-scientific bullshit filling the innerwebz by taking the modest results of a small study (about the fact that mimicking accents helps sentence comprehension) and jumping to the wild and unfounded conclusion that salespeople should start faking accents. It would make a great Monty Python skit, but it's a sad blog post from an editor of a prestigious business magazine. Money quote:

But this study suggests another possibility. Perhaps part of why mirroring and matching works is not because of how it operates on the prospect in a sales conversation, but how it operates on the salesperson. When we switch into another person's mode, however superficially, perhaps our brains are triggered to do so on a deeper level, and we become more able to receive the information that person is trying to convey.

We all know the key to empathy is to walk a mile in another's shoes. That can never literally be done, especially in brief sales encounters. But at least we can put on their brogues.

sigh...

so you want to study linguistics?

2010-12-14T08:33:00.002-05:00

Recently, a reader asked me for advice about studying linguistics. She is an undergraduate in the USA at a college that does not offer a BA in linguistics and she likes math and language, particularly historical linguistics. I've posted advice to students before here, but this new request was a particularly interesting variation. What do you do if you're a smart 20 year old at a school that does not quite offer what you want? What follows is an edited version of the email I sent back:

I must begin with a warning: academic linguistics is a small field, there is precious little room for mediocrity. There are two kinds of academic linguists, the top 15% and the unemployed.

With that said, if your school doesn't offer linguistics as a degree, then I suggest psychology (the experimental, lab-based kind) or computer science. Get hands-on experience in lab settings where you are collecting and analyzing data. Learn basic scientific method. Both psychology and computer science can offer that. Computational linguistics is a hot field with lots of opportunities in all sub-fields of linguistics. Plus, they can get jobs, hehe. High paying jobs! Computational linguists are one the the few who can get jobs outside of academia, but the truth is most industry CL jobs are really programming jobs where your programing skills are the real reason you get a job; your Natural Language Processing (NLP) skills are little more than icing on the cake. The industry is really looking for engineers with some NLP experience, not linguists with some programming skills.

There's nothing wrong with majoring in math (I definitely think all 21st Century linguists should study math), though I think knowing stats is preferable, and that's really a separate field. There is some controversy regarding whether linear algebra or calculus is better for linguistics (see here, especially the comments), but I really do think stats is key.

Studying biology or genetics is a possibility (neurolinguistics is a hot field). Liberman posted about genetics and linguistics here.

Probably the single best thing you can do for yourself right now is work your way through the NLTK book. This will teach you about basic concepts, plus teach you basic tools as well, and it's completely free! You could also start learning the R language, a great stats based language that many linguists are using these days.

You could also work your way through Tarski's World because basic logic is a sound foundation for all disciplines.

If you want a serious challenge, get your hands on the late Partha Niyogi's ' The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution'. He passed away recently, far too young for a rising star. He was a pioneer in using mathematical models to understand linguistics.

If you're interested in cognitive science and linguistics, I suggest regularly reading the Child's Play blog, written by two Stanford cognitive science grad students.

My general advice to any undergrad is simple: don't sweat your undergrad too much; it's the least important part of your education. Just get it done, regardless of which major you choose, and move on to the good stuff in grad school.

a debate!

2010-12-13T11:27:00.001-05:00

From The Economist: This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think. Discuss...

2010-12-13T10:30:00.001-05:00

A new drink from the SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN:

The Psycholinguist

wine (any kind: color is not a dependent variable in this study)
several glasses
1 stopwatch

Pour the wine into a glass while whining about how no one has properly modeled the process of wine pouring. Observe the wine under controlled conditions for an hour. Present a wordy but content-less paper to an international conference on what wine might look like in infants. Rerun the analysis in a different glass in case the receptor affects the nature of the process. Wait another hour. Drink the wine. Drink more wine. Fall onto the floor drunk, bumping your head on a pipe on the way down. Write an even less coherent paper on the effects of head bumping on linguistic processing. Gain professorship.

pimp grammar

2010-12-13T08:33:00.000-05:00

There's a pimp's handwritten business plan floating around the interwebz. While the soundness of its basic logic cannot be denied ("Treat This Pimpin Like it's a Business" indeed), the former writing teacher in me could not help but pull out the old red pen and make a few suggestions. But here's the thing, it's a fact of contemporary college education that most writing teachers are loath to outright criticize or correct their students (they're paying tuition after all). You see, outside of the Ivy League, most college writing teachers are faced with whole classrooms filled with pimps like Keep It Pimpin', and they're our bread and butter (we can't all be blessed with students like the Winkelvi, can we?). As a result, we are careful to word our feedback delicately, so as not to offend the senses of the ones who pad our, admittedly thin, paychecks*.

*Absolute truth: I taught college level research writing courses for the whopping total price of $1250/semester. The MOST I ever got paid for teaching a college level course was $2800. In the (modified) words of my literary hero DJay:

You know it's hard out here for a [rhetoric & writing instructor].
When he tryin to get this money for the rent.
For the Cadillacs and gas money spent
Because a whole lotta [students] talkin [nonsense].

HT kottke.

a brief history of stanford linguistics dissertations

2010-12-09T10:44:00.000-05:00

The above image comes from the Stanford Dissertation Browser and is centered on Linguistics. This tool performs some kind of textual analysis of Stanford dissertations: every dissertation is taken as a weighted mixture of a unigram language model associated with every Stanford department. This lets us infer, that, say, dissertation X is 60% computer science, 20% physics, and so on...Essentially, the visualization shows word overlap between departments measured by letting the dissertations in one department borrow words from another department..

Thus, the image above suggests that Linguistics borrows more words from Computer Science, Education, and Psychology than it does from other disciplines. What was most interesting was using the Back button to creating a moving picture of dissertation language over the last 15 years. you'll see a lot of bouncing back and forth. Stats makes a couple jumps here and there.

HT Razib Khan

the baffling linguistics of job postings

2010-12-08T08:33:00.001-05:00

While Googling around for other things, I caught this odd fish contained within a job posting for an Account Manager:

DISCLAIMER: ... Linguistics used herein may use First Person Singular and First Person Plural grammatical person construction for and with the meaning of Third Person Singular and Third Person Plural references. We reserves the right to amend and change responsibilities to meet business and organizational needs as necessary (emphasis added).

If I understand this correctly, the bold faced passage says that the authors are allowing themselves to use constructions like "we walks..." and "we talks..."

But, if you look at the uses of "we" within the text of the actual job posting, nowhere do they actually do this, EXCEPT in the disclaimer itself. I find this baffling. What is the purpose of this? Simply to allow them to write "We reserves..." I Googled the sentence and found it popping up in all kinds of job postings and the same thing is true. The only time a posting invokes its self-appointed right to this grammatical modification, is within the disclaimer. It appears to be boiler-plate job-speak of some kind. I'm remarkably freaked out by this.

how to spot an academic con artist

2010-12-02T11:44:00.001-05:00

If you've been to college, you were taught how to scrutinize research sources at some point. Let's test your skills, shall we? Imagine you run across a popularized article and the author promotes his own expertise using the following:

"Ph.D" after his name.
Referencing his multiple books.
Noting his academic appointments.
You look at his personal web page list of publications and you see dozens of articles and books going back several decades.

Must be an expert, right? Must be legit, right? This is what I saw for John Medina, Ph.D., author of the HuffPo article 'Parentese': Can Speaking To Your Baby This Way Make Her Smarter? But I quickly became suspicious about this man's credentials. Why? Let's look more closely at those bullet points:

"Ph.D" after his name.

Once you've been to grad school, everyone you know has a Ph.D. It's just not that special

Referencing his multiple books.
Noting his academic appointments.

The University of Washington

Brain Center for Applied Learning Research

a house

You look at his personal web page list of publications and you see dozens of articles and books going back several decades.

dozens of publications

Psychiatric Times

Geriatric Times

Add to this the fact that his recommendations seem to be little more than common sense (i.e., talk to your kids more...no duh!). I have no problem with someone making money off their education, but this seems to be an example of trying to con people into believing he has more to say than he really does simply because of the letters P-h-D after his name.

Despite writing this, I don't feel terribly comfortable casting aspersions on someone who may indeed be a serious, legitimate academic. If I have made mistakes in this critique, I will apologize. But then again it is incumbent upon Medina to do a better job of representing his credentials. And it is incumbent upon us as us a lay readers (hey, I ain't no molecular biologists either) to scrutinize supposed experts who are asking us to pay for their expertise (in the form of book prices and speaking fees).

94,000 language deaths!

2010-12-01T08:33:00.000-05:00

History's only Emmy-nominated linguist* K. David Harrison answers questions over at The Johnson blog about language death, his favorite topic. He repeats what he's been saying for the last few years about language death, and he generally makes good points; however, he says two things worth responding to:

"The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages"
"...bilingualism strengthens the brain"

The first one is a vague and complicated claim often promoted by language-deathers** and the second is a goofy metaphor (at best). Let's walk through the reasons why these statements should not be a part of a serious discussion of language death:

The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages
My primary critique of this claim is that it's just not clear what it really means. In what way does a language uniquely encode information? Harrison provides a few simple examples, mostly lexical items that show us how a particular language fore-fronted particular features to encode, and the argument is that that tells us something about that culture's perceptions of what was important to them. This is probably true to some extant, but honestly, we still do not understand language well enough to truly understand what lexical features tell us about a culture. This is hyperbole at best. But this is NOT an argument against language death per se, it's just a fact.

So what if we lose some facts about a culture's perceptions of the world? Let's assume there are 6000 language alive today. How many have already died? We don't know. For a rough estimate, let's draw an analogy and ask the question, how many humans have ever lived? A few years ago, the Population Reference Bureau did a "semi-scientific" guesstimate of this question and determined that less than 6% of all people who had ever lived, were still alive in 2002. If we assume that languages come and go at a pace that correlates with populations, then we can assume that the current 6000 living languages are about 6% of the total number of languages that ever existed. That means the total number of languages that have ever existed is around 100,000***. This means we've already lost 94,000 languages that were never documented. 94,000 language deaths. 94,000 lost knowledge bases. Oh, the horror, the horror!

Exactly how bad off should we currently be if Harrison is correct about the ill effects of language death now that we know we've lost 94,000 languages? Are we really that bad off? Clearly the answer is no, we're not that bad off. If losing 94,000 languages has not caused grave danger to humanity, why would losing another 3,000?

Yes, I agree that all languages have unique linguistic properties that are worth studying in themselves. But just because we find interesting data in every language does NOT mean we should stop language death per se. We need a broader understanding of the system of language interaction and language evolution, otherwise stopping language death may be as irresponsible as causing language death. Genetics blogger Razib Khan has made a compelling argument that "high linguistic diversity is not conducive to economic growth, social cooperation, and amity." This is just one speculative claim, but at least it's a voice on the other side of this issue.

bilingualism strengthens the brain
This is just goofy phrasing. He's referencing important neurolinguistic research, so why trivialize it by using such patently absurd language?

*I actually don't know this to be true, definitively.
**Ooooh, I'm being a little caustic there, hehe.
***This estimate is remarkably similar to the ones David Crystal discusses in his book Language Death. In that book, he says anywhere from 64,000 to 140,000 is a reasonable guesstimate. My 100,000 splits that damn near down the middle.

purple pain and a gene called 'straightjacket'

2010-11-23T07:33:00.004-05:00

Dr. Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Smurfit Institute of Genetics, University of Dublin, posted at his excellent blog Wiring the Brain about a weird, interesting study* that points to a possible genetic explanation of synaesthesia** (e.g., hearing a word and experiencing the color red). The authors were studying pain mechanisms in fruit flies (turns out the mechanisms are similar to us mammals, whuddathunk?). Once they identified a particular gene they dubbed straightjacket*** which is "involved in modulating neurotransmission," they systematically deleted it in test flies and discovered that the test subjects**** no longer processed the pain stimuli, even though the pain stimuli was following the pathway. In Mitchell's words:

Somehow, deletion of CACNA2D3 alters connectivity within the thalamus or from thalamus to cortex in a way that precludes transmission of the signal to the pain matrix areas. This is where the story really gets interesting. While they did not observe responses of the pain matrix areas in response to painful stimuli, they did observe something very unexpected – responses of the visual and auditory areas of the cortex! What’s more, they observed similar responses to tactile stimuli administered to the whiskers. Whatever is going on clearly affects more than just the pain circuitry (emphasis added).

So, if I understand this, they turned off the ability to recognize pain, but when they administered painful stimuli (heat), the test subjects had visual, auditory, and tactile experiences. Imagine putting a flame to your hand and seeing purple. Pretty frikkin awesome. Dr. Mitchell's post does more justice to this complex study, I just thought it was awesome.

*Geez! Take a look at the author list of the publication. Do you have a place for 12th author on YOUR CV?

**FYI: Synaesthesia is NOT the same thing as sound symbolism, necessarily. True synaesthesia is a rare phenomenon that appears to have biophysical roots. Sound symbolism is mostly hippie-dippy bullshit exploited by marketing professionals to sell stuff.

***I have no clue why they called it this, but it's a hell of a lot more awesome than CACNA2D3.

****There were multiple studies referenced, some involving fruit flies, some involving mice, and it wasn't clear to me which evidence came from which studies, so I have chosen to use the cover term "test subjects."

Neely GG, Hess A, Costigan M, Keene AC, Goulas S, Langeslag M, Griffin RS, Belfer I, Dai F, Smith SB, Diatchenko L, Gupta V, Xia CP, Amann S, Kreitz S, Heindl-Erdmann C, Wolz S, Ly CV, Arora S, Sarangi R, Dan D, Novatchkova M, Rosenzweig M, Gibson DG, Truong D, Schramek D, Zoranovic T, Cronin SJ, Angjeli B, Brune K, Dietzl G, Maixner W, Meixner A, Thomas W, Pospisilik JA, Alenius M, Kress M, Subramaniam S, Garrity PA, Bellen HJ, Woolf CJ, & Penninger JM (2010). A Genome-wide Drosophila Screen for Heat Nociception Identifies α2δ3 as an Evolutionarily Conserved Pain Gene. Cell, 143 (4), 628-38 PMID: 21074052

unaxseptable

2010-11-22T15:29:00.000-05:00

kottke rants against Google's biased calculator (because it provides an answer rather than search results) then finishes with this:

Google! This. Is. Un. Acce. Ptable!

Huh? Does kottke have dyslexia*? I get the staccato pronunciation he's representing, but that's not at all how I would say it. I would say (and write): Un. Ac. Cept. Able! Even if you want to pose your own variation, can we agree that kottke's is simply not a viable analysis of the syllable structure of the word? The double "c" spelling makes it a bit odd looking, but it actually helps in the analysis. Each "c" represents a different sound, and each sound should go in a different syllable. And how does he start the final syllable with "pt"! That is unaxseptable!

*Dyslexics can have difficulty counting syllables.

Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

2010-11-20T08:33:00.004-05:00

I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ... since ... um ... okay, the most linguistics oriented sitcom episode EVER! But thanks to the innerwebz, I have caught up on my TV addiction.

The set-up has Jack Donaghy being the voice of Pronouncify.com, (I BEG you to sign up, PLEASE!!!!) a website that demonstrates the correct pronunciation of all English words. Apparently, when Jack was a poor undergrad at Princeton, he was hired by the "Linguistics Department" to pronounce every word in an English dictionary to preserve the correct pronunciation for generations to come. But they sold his readings, and hence his voice is now the voice of Pronouncify.com (as well as the first perfect microwave...).

Here is as faithful a transcript of the critical dialogue as I can muster:

Jack: Those bastards!
Liz: Who bastards?
Jack: Part of my Princeton scholarship included work for the Linguistics department. They wanted me to record every word in the dictionary to preserve the perfect American accent in case of nuclear war. Well, the cold war ended, and Princeton began selling the recordings.
Liz: So people can just buy your voice?
Jack: Ohhhh, the things it's been dragged into. Thomas the Tank Engine; Wu-Tang songs...

This must have been the glory days before the hippies took over and started "protecting" undergrads from "exploitation." Whatever...

In any case, it's understandable that this trivial tid-bit of academic minutia blew right by most people, but it is a fact of the world we live in that Princeton University does not have a linguistics department per se. They do offer an Undergraduate Program in Linguistics in which students can "pursue a Certificate in Linguistics," but this is not an official department as far as I understand it. Jack, if he is the same age as the actor Alec Baldwin, would have been at Princeton in late 1970s. Maybe they had a full fledged department back then, I honestly don't know.

You can watch the episode College at NBC, or wherever else you prefer. BTW, there's an awesome ode to color perception conundrums at the end as well. It's all kinda linguisticee/cog sciencee (I never know how to add the -ee morpheme?).

Random after-point: Near the end of Thursday's episode of Community, Dean Pelton actually utilized the Shakespearean subjunctive construction Would that X were Y... He says "Would that this hoodie were a time hoodie" around the 19:20 mark (see Hamlet, would it were not so, you are my mother). Just thought that was kinda awesome.

And not for nuthin', but if you haven't seen Tina Fey's Mark Twain Prize speech, it's a gem: HERE.