Ambiguous Hookers & Psycho Sheep Wrestlers

'Tis the season for lists, and this one caught my eye: 50 Funniest Headlines Of 2009 (HT Daily Dish ). I expected more of them to be linguistically interesting, but few were. Instead, there are a lot of tasered grammas and schoolboy sex jokes. Nonetheless, there are a few whose humor lies in the linguistic structure of the headline. Personal fav: #9 Nutt faces sack. Here are the others by linguistic category

Lexical Ambiguity

#4. Hooker Named Lay Person Of The Year
#7. Pittsburgh Police Want To See Junk In Your Trunk
#23. Facebook Forms Board To Lick Molesters
#38. Courtney Love Banned From Using Hole
#44. Hooker Named Indoor Athlete Of The Year.

Garden Path
#6. Trooper Fired After Hat Fib Wants Back In

Pseudo-Garden Path
#31. Sheep Wrestlers Feared Psycho

Misspelling

#30. Church Kids Raid Panty's For Foodbank Supplies (note: bonus misuse of apostrophe).

Dyslexia???
#21. Winter Storm Closes Schools Across P.E.I., N.S

That's why they call it money.

How much are NLP start-ups worth? About $100 million. That's about how much Nuance just paid for SpinVox, and that's about how much Microsoft paid for Powerset a year and a half ago. From TechCrunch:

SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated, has been acquired by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5 million.

Loyal perusers of The Linguist List's job board should be familiar will all of those companies. But don't let that price tag fool you, SpinVox also had $200 million in investment, so somebody's still waiting to get paid. (Disclaimer: yes, I understand that valuation is complicated and this coincidence in price tags means nothing, just funnin').

Proud Brother

My sister Lori, a long time pre-school teacher throughout Northern California who now owns her own preschool in Orland CA (and who has big plans to be a huge success as a children's book author someday) has started her own blog. And it's about time. She has the soul of a blogger.

• Preschool Diary
  

Behold! The Tweet King!

Has Twitter made us all better computational linguists? Their 140 character limit forces us all to think in terms of characters (including whitespaces) rather than the slippery notion of words. Betcha tweetheads understand the concept of offset better than the average 1st year linguist.

Manning on NLP

Freely available: The complete set of 18 lectures from Stanford Professor Christopher Manning's Natural Language Processing course. With a nifty web player that allows you to take notes on the video.

CS224N - Natural Language Processing.

Excellent description of topics so you can pick and choose your lecture. 

Theory of Meaning

Posdcasts of most of the lectures from Professor of Philosophy John Campbell's Theory of Meaning course at Cal.

Philosophy 135 - Theory of Meaning

Unfortunately the site doesn't list what topics each podcast covers, so it's a bit of a gamble. Just open one and have a listen (some video available as well).

More Experiments!

I love online demos and live experiments because they give non-experts a user friendly, non-intimidating way to see some of the bread and butter tools of contemporary linguistics. Thanks to the excellent blog from the Human Language Processing (HLP) lab at the University of Rochester, I've discovered a few more to pass on (I have a list to your left under Call For Participation).

• Alex Drummond 's self paced reading demo (this is a common experimental paradigm within psycholinguistics).

• Masha Polinsky’s lab has a variety of experiments up for several languages:
  

English
English: Pre-Test Questionnaire
English Experiment
English Experiment: Acceptability Judgments Only

Czech
Čestina: Experiment

Russian
Russian: Pre-Test Questionnaire
Russian Experiment