trying to blog my research : Mary Wood from University of Manchester just gave a talk on “A Human-Computer Collaborative Approach to Computer Aided Assessment“. Abstract: The ABC (Assess by Computer) system has been developed and used in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester for formative and (principally) summative assessment at […]
Category Archives: linguistics
Paradise Defined
09-Aug-04Word-loans, and the evolution of language is always so interesting… they give a glimpse into the way that we think that isn’t always so readily seen from everyday life (kind of like using a hex editor to hack into your favorite program, to see what you can find hidden in there). According to Brad Delong, […]
The Subtleties of English
05-Aug-04Been a lot of posts in the blogosphere about English: From mefi: “The British Library has compiled an online archive of northern speech dating back to the 19th century. The recordings range from from audio from Victorian cylinder dictaphones to 1950s football fans chanting.” From Language Log: “an experiment comparing how different English accents are […]
TactLang on LanguageHat
10-Jul-04National newspapers et. al. are one thing, but I must admit it was a little more fun for me to see the Tactical Language project mentioned on LanguageHat. The coments down below the main article were a grim reminder to the ethical problems that one faces in Computer Science and Linguistics. It’s funny: I remember […]
InSTIL 2004
02-Jun-04June 17-19, Venice, Italy. Presenting a couple papers (and a poster) on Computer Assisted Language Learning–my current academic research into modelling the kinds of mistakes that an American will make as he learns Levantine Arabic. Files: InSTIL ASR paper (Mote et. al, 2004) InSTIL general paper (Johnson et. al, 2004) InSTIL ASR poster Here’s the […]
realworld colliding with the online
27-May-04Strange… I had been following the Semantic Compositions blog , along with a few others of the linguistics/AI ilk, for a good number of months now. I’d never given a second thought to who was behind SC’s anonymity until I came across this post this morning. It was quite strange to read about Laurie’s mixer […]
Borges: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
27-May-04Hilarious. Evidently, Wikipedia used to have an entry for Uqbar that followed in the spirit of Borges’ original story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The story is an amazing work of art, blurring in the mind of the reader the lines between fiction and nonfiction, reality and nonreality. Borges basically tells of this imaginary (?) world […]
Silbo
18-Nov-03as this CNN article describes, there’s an ancient, near-extinct language called Silbo that is whistled, not spoken (in Spanish silbar == to whistle). Supposedly, it allows the speaker (err, whistler) to communicate over long distances… Listen to a sample of it here. Interesting…
words, words, words
14-May-03was talking with my girlfriend and her roommate earlier this week, and we came to this startling revelation: ever notice that, no matter what the language, the fruit orange and the color orange are always related? i wonder why… it would make sense if there were no other orange things in the world besides oranges…but […]