Emerging Computational Linguistics

Here is another Gary Larson perspective on trying to understand another species.

Of course, a human language is composed of constituents (phrases) that can be combined in many different ways.  If these dolphins were capable of human type communication, then these ’scientists’ would at least be looking for pieces of sentences and recombinations of those sentences in novel ways instead of just repitition of the top level sentences.

But still, it is funny.

My appologies to the copyright holder of this image.

We went to see Steven Pinker at the Seattle Town Hall.  He is promoting his new book - The Stuff of Thought.  I have read several of his books, so I was pleased to have a chance to hear him speak.

One of the focus points of his talk was how English uses prepositions to designate space and time.  For example, he asked why do we say something is under water when the object is truly surrounded by water, and why do we say after dark when we really mean a time period surrounded by darkness.  His proposition is that the mind simplifies its perspective when possible (Occam’s Razor?).  The surface of water become a 2-D boundary which then an object can be above or under.  Similarly, the boundary of nighttime (darkness) becomes a point in time after which we say ‘after dark’.  As further illustration of the dimensional reduction, he pointed out that we don’t say, “an ant walks along a plate”, because the preposition along requires a one dimensional object, and that we do say, “an ant walks along the edge of a plate” because in one sense, the edge can be tought of as a one dimensional object.

The most entertaining portion of his talk was about how swearing is used.  I suspect the reason it was so funny was the contrast between his clinical descriptions (formal register) of swearing and the familiar register that is used when someone is swearing.  He gave the example of someone accepting an award for popular music saying “this is really f***ing brilliant” and saying how in this case “f***ing” is used as an adverb.

Another example he gave that was astonishing was the case of the world trade center disaster.  Apparently, the insurance contract has a phrase of “3.5 billion dollars per event”.  The court case was held up on interpretting whether the 9/11 incident was one event, as in one master plan of destruction was executed, or if it was two events, as in two airplanes were used to destroy two buildings.  The effect of this distinction was whether the insurance should pay $3.5 billion or $7 billion.  Quite a substantial difference that is based on the judgement of a linguist.

Overall, Dr. Pinker’s presentation was very entertaining and enlightening.  If you have a chance to hear him speak, I recommend that you go.

I have left my job so that I can enter a graduate program in Comp Ling.  As I was saying goodbye to someone, I said, “I haven’t been unemployed since I was in highschool.”

 His reply was, “Yea, and you felt good in highschool, didn’t ya!”

Needless to say, I am a bit excited about this opportunity that I have to start in the program at the University of Washington.

In a New York Times article on sexual desire titled “Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It.”, the author asks an assortment of men and women, “What is sexual desire, and how do you know you’re feeling it?”

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

The article was By NATALIE ANGIER Published: April 10, 2007.

My wife tells the story of her piano teacher from her childhood.  She lived in a small town in Montana.  The piano teacher lived in a nice house within walking distance.  (Everything was in walking distance in this small own).  The teacher owned a parrot that was fond of greeting everyone that came to lessons and was a favorite with younger piano students.

Once, during a piano recital in the home, someone was playing a delicate piece.  It may have been Chopin or Liszt or some other composer.  The performance went very well and when it ended there was a thoughtful silence as everyone basked in the mood of the music.  The parrot thought it was too quiet, so he interrupted with “Sid, where’s my girdle?”.  Everyone laughed.

Now, we own an African Grey Parrot (pictured).  Her name is Beignet (ben-YAY) which is a french pastry.  She is somewhat talkative, although we haven’t yet been able to get her to talk in response to our voices.  Mostly she talks when we are in the other room.

When the “where’s my girdle” story comes to mind, I try to think of funny things to teach our parrot.  Today I was repeating “Clean the house, company’s coming!”

“Look, a hundred years ago, a couple of pesky bike mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, bested, in effect, the government-funded player, to become the first to fly,” he added. “That’s why you put on these things: to attract the bicycle mechanics.”

Gregg E. Maryniak
Executive Vice President
The X PRIZE Foundation

He was quoted in NYTimes, April 5, 2006.
He was talking about NASA’s competitions to spur innovation.

We did a party game about writing stories.  Each story was made up of sentences written by each player of the game.  The sentences came from words that were picked arbitrarily by the players before we started writing the stories.

Each pair of words was a name of something and a word for an action (verb).  Thus each player had to write sentences that used the arbitrary noun and verb together.

Not all sentences contained both words in the pair.  Some were written as two sentences.  So this isn’t a scientific study of nouns and verbs, but we had fun.

Here is the link to the word lists and stories we wrote.

Any Noun and Any Verb