language technology
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on January 02, 2013
People have long been fascinated with the idea of time travel and often speculate on the marvelous things that it would enable them to do. Here’s a reason we can be thankful that we cannot readily receive visitors from the past: some of English’s greatest writers, if they should drop in for a visit to [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on November 19, 2012
To begin, and so that you won’t feel you have yet another language problem on your plate, the preposition problem here is not a problem for you; it’s a problem for computers. You remember computers—those machines we rely on increasingly to do a huge amount of work for us. A big job for computers today [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 13, 2012
Last week’s announcement that Macmillan won’t in future be publishing dictionaries in book form sparked a lively debate – some of it on this blog, some in the news media, and some in other online forums. The response, it’s fair to say, was mixed. ‘What a sad day’, said one subscriber to a lexicography discussion [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 05, 2012
Umberto Eco recently argued that “The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved”. But dictionaries are different from other books. Like maps and encyclopedias – but unlike novels or newspapers – dictionaries are things you consult (while you’re doing something else) rather than things you read. For [...]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on October 29, 2012
In his TV documentary The Deep, David Attenborough relates how his team found a recently-dead whale at the bottom of the sea. The vast beast is food for millions. The hagfish find the corpse, and start scraping away at the skin with two rows of horny teeth. Seven-meter-long sweeper sharks dig deep holes into the [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on September 24, 2012
Crowd-sourcing refers to a ‘distributed’ method for solving problems or completing complex tasks, where large numbers of people contribute their time, knowledge and expertise in a collaborative way. The term was coined in 2006 – as I learned when re-reading Kerry Maxwell’s interesting ‘Buzzword’ article on it, written when the word was still quite new. An [...]
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Posted by Paul Cook on September 17, 2012
Our guest blogger today is Paul Cook, who works in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. His cross-disciplinary research in computational linguistics considers new ways in which computational methods can be used to study language and identify new words and meanings. How do lexicographers find new words to consider [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on August 13, 2012
Here’s a made-up sentence. See if you can spot the three most infrequent words in it: If you eschew expensive restaurants, you will save more than an exiguous amount, and this will ameliorate your financial situation. That wasn’t too difficult, was it? We’ve discussed before the idea that very few words are exact synonyms of [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on June 23, 2012
If it wasn’t for the British mathematician Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today, you probably wouldn’t be reading the Macmillan blog – or any other blog for that matter. Without Turing’s visionary thinking, computers may not have developed as far as they have. A website dedicated to his work describes Turing as [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 29, 2012
How does the language you use in text messages differ from your email style, and from your prose in more formal contexts? This is something to which I’ve been paying more attention since reading David Crystal’s book Txtng: The gr8 db8, which examines text language and refutes complaints that it’s an indication of illiteracy, laziness, [...]
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