language technology
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Posted by Caroline Short on August 11, 2011
This week’s ‘language in new media’ post explores the ‘melody of microblogging’ in ‘The real sound of Twitter’. 21-year-old student Sam Harman, or “evil doctor tweet” as he is sometimes known, has created a programme which turns the global language of Twitter into music. Twinthesis, or ‘Twitter powered synthesis’, harnesses the daily tirade of tweets [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on February 17, 2011
Macmillan runs a series of webinars, which are a bit like interactive lectures that anyone can join in. Coming up in 2011 are speakers such as Lindsay Clanfield and Simon Greenall, and from the same page you can watch sessions from the archive featuring well-known language-teaching experts like Scott Thornbury, Ken Wilson and Sam McCarter. [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on February 15, 2011
In December, Sharon mentioned Google’s Ngram viewer, a nifty new tool that lets you see how often words or phrases appear in more than five million texts in Google Books. Results appear in the form of a graph, which you can adjust by timeframe (1800–2000), degree of detail (rough–smooth), and corpus type (several languages and [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on February 13, 2011
Chances are you’ve noticed that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. To celebrate the day of love and affection, on Monday 14th February, Macmillan Dictionary is having a one-day (and one-day-only) price drop on the Macmillan English Dictionary apps for iPod Touch, iPad and iPhone. The price of any version of the dictionary will drop and will [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 11, 2010
Stan Carey’s post yesterday was a nice reminder of how a word or phrase can suddenly gain widespread currency simply as a result of fashion. And as with any trend, the kudos gained by the user declines in inverse proportion to the number of users – so that in the end the phrase becomes an [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on October 21, 2010
Check out this article about how many texts teenagers send in a month. Over 3,000! Even with pitfalls such as thumbos and Blackberry thumb, the trend for SMS texting continues apace. The article quotes a recent study in which the ability to send texts was the number one reason teenagers bought a mobile phone. For more [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on August 16, 2010
How do you feel about ‘verbing’? It’s something we touched on in our news round-up recently, and no, it’s not rude – it’s the increasingly well-recognized practice of creating a verb out of a noun, like ‘google’, ‘tweet’, ‘text’, or ‘friend’. And it causes a lot of controversy. Many of the words spawned this way [...]
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Posted by Adam Kilgarriff on June 24, 2010
Our next guest post comes from Adam Kilgarriff. Adam is a linguist, and a specialist in the area where linguistics, computers and dictionaries meet. He was at Brighton University until 2004 when he set up his own company, Lexical Computing Ltd. He lives in Brighton, and will be taking a lunchtime swim in the sea [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on April 12, 2010
Have you noticed how, in the past 10 years, a whole bunch of completely unrelated words have become totally interchangeable, all thanks to predictive texting? Predictive texting is now a feature of pretty much every mobile phone on the market, and love it or hate it, we’re all exposed to it in one way or [...]
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Posted by Kati Sule on April 20, 2009
The countdown for the annual Webby Awards, aka the Oscars for the Web, has started: there are ten more days left to cast your vote. (Voting stops at the end of April.) This year, one of the more interesting nominees, in the category of ‘Best typography’, is Wordle. Wordle has been created by Jonathan Feinberg, [...]
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