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Category: language (page 20 of 22)

Why did the robot cross the road?

7 August 2007 / / 3 Comments

Getting a computer to recognise humour is a tricky undertaking, but some language researchers are attempting it — if you can call puns ‘humour’.

Understanding a pun is sort of like a word-sense disambiguation task. If you’ll forgive an example:

Sign at a drug rehabilitation center: “Keep off the grass.”

Here, two senses of a word play off each other, to somewhat humourous effect. Word-sense disambiguation is a well-studied area in natural language processing, so this is as good a place as any to start.

Here’s an account of one such attempt.

To teach the program to spot jokes, the researchers first gave it a database of words, extracted from a children’s dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings. When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn’t seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke. The result is a bot that “gets” jokes that turn on a simple pun.

That sounds simple, but the main problem is how to tell when words don’t seem to fit with the other words in the sentence. For this project, it sounds like they’re generating co-occurrence tables, or statistics about how often any given word is likely to be seen with any other given word. That way, if a word shows up with other words it’s not likely to co-occur with, the system will flag it.

Click on the graphic for an example:

This approach might work well for puns that rely on similar-sounding words, but what about our ‘Keep off the grass’ example above, where the pun relies on two senses of the same word? This system will fail to notice that a pun exists because there’s nothing to suggest that a “Keep off the grass” sign is anything out of the ordinary. And ‘drug’ and ‘grass’ do happen to co-occur in texts, so the system will see no incongruity.

To recognise these kinds of jokes, I might try scanning words in the sentence for multiple senses, and then seeing if groups of words show interesting properties. Perhaps ‘grass-1’ will co-occur frequently with ‘keep’, ‘off’, and ‘sign’, but ‘grass-2’ will co-occur with ‘drug’ and ‘rehabilitation’. We might then infer that since both senses of ‘grass’ are well-linked to different words in the sentence, a pun is going on.

This kind of approach, where we look for unexpected word occurrences, comes close to the essence of humour. Many things are funny because they’re unexpected, yet somehow right. To a small child, slipping on a banana peel is funny because it’s unexpected. Walking down the street unimpeded is normal, and therefore not funny. As humans, we have a lot of experience with the world, and we know what’s likely to happen and what’s not. Giving this informaton to computers is a difficult task, but it may be the key to humour recognition.

Hindu fundamentalists and Sanskrit supremecists

13 July 2007 / / 1 Comment

Once I was at the UWA Open Day, answering questions at the Linguistics table. We get a few — what’s the deal with Yiddish? Is the Tower of Babel story plausible? What was the original language? and so forth.

But a gentleman came up to the display, and after seeing the language genealogy chart, said to me, “Are you saying that Sanskrit is not the oldest language?”

“That’s correct,” said I. “Sanskrit itself came from an earlier language, which we call Proto-Indo-European.”

“This is not possible,” he said. “Sanskrit is the earliest language.”

“Well, not really,” I explained. “Proto-Indo-European is the parent language for a lot of other languages, including English, Latin, Greek, and Farsi. And Sanskrit,” I added, as he began to look steamed. “Of course, Proto-Indo-European is so old that we’ve had to reconstruct it. All we know about it has been hypothesised from looking at later languages.”

He thought about that, decided that he had no significant objections, and went away.

“What in the world was that all about?” I asked. Had I met a Sanskrit supremacist? Would there be more?

Well, I have just run across this page full of fun facts about fundamentalist Hinduism.

Indian Civilization has unceasingly existed for 1,972 million years ago as the fully developed Ganges civilization

Yep, nearly 2 billion years old and counting. So Indian civilisation existed in its present form sometime during the early Proterozoic period.

Sanskrit has been in its perfect state since its origin millions of years ago.

So while humans have existed only about 100,000 years, Sanskrit is millions of years older. One wonders who might have spoken it. Perhaps trilobites.

I suppose the Fundamentalist Hindu gentleman decided not to press the question because Proto-Indo-European was hypothesised by scientists, and could therefore be ignored.

Are there fundamentalist Buddhists? Do I need to prepare? Only one thing is for sure. When you see someone making no sense, religious doctrine can’t be far behind.

Australian language policy at work

25 May 2007 / / Comments Off on Australian language policy at work

Because Australian languages aren’t disappearing quickly enough.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough says it should be compulsory for Aboriginal children to learn English.

Mr Brough says children will not be able to get jobs if they cannot speak English and do not have a basic education, and he is considering a plan to quarantine welfare payments to ensure parents send their children to school.

Have you ever wondered why English proponents even exist, seeing as English is already pretty popular around here? So have I. Maybe it’s one of these things where you train a dog by telling it to do stuff that it’s already doing. At last, a language policy that could actually achieve its stated goals.

And it’s nice that they’re concerned about indigenous kids getting jobs. I wonder if there’s any other legislation being considered that would help them get jobs. Some kind of Affirmative Action thing. Nope, teaching them English should be enough. Problem solved.

Here’s someone who understands the problem.

New South Wales’ first Indigenous MP, Linda Burney, says Mr Brough seems to lack a fundamental understanding of Aboriginality.

“I think that he needs to understand that culture and country is incredibly important to Aboriginal people and they will be protected at all costs,” he said.

“Aboriginal kids do need to be bilingual but it’s a bit rich coming from a person who actually is part of a Government that took away funding for bilingual programs in the Northern Territory.”

Ms Burney says one of the biggest tragedies is losing traditional Aboriginal languages, a problem that is not being addressed.

She says Mr Brough’s proposal could lead to “cultural death”.

“Now, it is important to be bilingual – there’s no two ways about it – but it can’t be at the expense of your mother tongue.”

This is exactly right. Support English lessons for anyone who wants them. But don’t hasten language death by tying welfare payments to forced English lessons.

Hitchens on Falwell

18 May 2007 / / 4 Comments

Falwell’s death has made the world a better place, and in this clip Hitch gives an anti-eulogy.

Lots of intriguing thoughts here:

  • Do religious conmen really believe their schtick?
  • If you think religion is false but ‘teaches good moral values’ (as I have been guilty of thinking from time to time), then how moral is it to teach lies to children?
  • Why do religious beliefs so often get a pass when it comes to critical evaluation?

But the interesting thing for me: Did anyone notice Anderson Cooper’s use of ‘yeah, no’ at 3:33? This is typically regarded as Australian, but it could be spreading.

Why do people say ‘yeah, no’? Is the ‘yeah’ an agreement, and the ‘no’ a discourse particle? If so, what’s the ‘no’ doing? Is it to backtrack to an earlier part of the discourse? Does it start a new branch off the dialogue? At this point, I tend to think it’s there to anticipate disagreement, or to set up an imaginary opponent, and disagree with them to show that you’re following your listener.

More research needs to be done et cetera.

Evidence for Exodus

8 April 2007 / / 2 Comments

Interesting article from the NYT on this Easter holiday:

Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

It’s a bit difficult to imagine what evidence there could be for this kind of event. Wave fossils? Sedimentary chariots?

I’m a bit more interested in the idea that the Hebrews were never in Egypt at all. One linguistic argument is that if they had been, we should expect to see lots of Egyptian loan words in Hebrew, and we don’t. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

[N]otwithstanding the long sojourn in Egypt, the number of Egyptian words that have found a place in the Hebrew vocabulary is exceedingly small.

This is probably something I’ll be posting on more as I learn more about it.

Schelling games

1 April 2007 / / 14 Comments

I opened Monday’s class by splitting my 150+ students into pairs for a few Schelling games. (Seventy-five pairs can be noisy.) To win at a Schelling game, all you have to do is guess the same thing that your partner guesses. And of course, they’re trying to guess the same thing you are. For example, if you can choose between heads or tails, which should you choose? You guessed it — almost everyone chose heads.

Schelling games are relevant to linguistics. Herbert Clark points out that dialogue works because there’s a tendency for people to try and coordinate their activities together using talk. This is true even when you’re working with someone you may not know well. You may not share much common ground with them, but you can still rely on a kind of garden-variety context.

The second round was ‘pick a number’. Here are the choices: 7, 13, 99, 261, 555. Which would you pick if you were trying to match someone who was trying to match you?

People who won tended to pick 13, although there were some interesting other answers. One pair won with 261.

“You both picked 261?” I asked. “That’s rather surprising.”

“We’re brother and sister!” they said.

Which made Clark’s point rather nicely. People who have no common ground will fall back on normal-seeming answers if they want to agree, but when two people have a lot of shared knowledge, unexpected things can take on a salience of their own.

Let’s try a Schelling game now. You win a free trip to any city in the world, but only if you choose the same city that your partner does. And your partner is me, and I’m trying to guess what you’ll guess. My answer is in comments.

Sheeple

23 March 2007 / / 1 Comment

I really hate the word ‘sheeple‘.

Let’s say I’m a nutjob with a theory. Here it is: Katrina was an inside job. The CIA controls the weather. I’m not sure if the White House let it happen or made it happen, but the whole thing is prophesied in Revelation (somewhere). You can’t prove me wrong. If I don’t have any evidence, it’s because the secret cabal has covered its tracks so carefully.

The likelihood of most people adopting my idea is low, though I’ll get a few other nutjobs to believe it. But at some point, I’ll have to answer a question: if my idea is so great, why don’t people believe in it?

That’s where the ‘sheeple’ idea comes in. I can blame people for being lazy, complacent, unthinking, and dumb. Anything but accept that my idea sucks.

Now these things may be true. Sometimes people aren’t good thinkers because they aren’t trained in critical thinking, and our existing ideas seem to make so much sense to us, especially when we only look for evidence to support them, not challenge them. I’m constantly seeing these tendencies in myself.

But conspiracy people like the word ‘sheeple’ because it’s easier to criticise people than to educate them, and it’s much easier than learning how to evaluate ideas and challenge them. Why do that when you can pretend you’re the misunderstood noble genius, like Galileo or Prometheus?

For its lazy and cynical misanthropy, I hereby exclude the word ‘sheeple’ from my vocabulary.

I hate when people say…

13 March 2007 / / Comments Off on I hate when people say…

When people learn that I’m a linguist, they sometimes imagine that I am an Official Grammar Arbiter. They say things like “Oh, I hate when people say ‘That was fun.’ Don’t you hate that?” Leaving me to wonder why they’d pick on that poor, innocent, perfectly acceptable sentence. Or something equally innocuous. It would be one thing if they’d complain about something ambiguous like ‘downwards’ instead of ‘downward’ or ‘if I were/was’. But it’s often some ordinary sentence that anyone would say.

Last night, a gentleman told me, “I’ve become more tolerant about grammar since reading the history of English.”

“Oh, really?” said I.

“Yes, I used to hate when people would say ‘That’s so great, or so interesting.”

“Um,” said I.

“But now I realise that English has been changing for a long time, and the English we use was once unacceptable. So I’ve become more tolerant about it.”

“That’s good,” said I.

Of faggotry and Coultery

6 March 2007 / / 7 Comments

It seems Ann Coulter is stuck in attack mode, which is very GOP. Straight from the Republican Handbook ‘Rules of Engagement’:

1. Attack and attack again.
2. Never admit wrongdoing.

Which didn’t work so well for Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s not working very well for Ann. Here’s her rather unconvincing and juvenile Humpty Dumpty impersonation:

“‘Faggot’ isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays,” Coulter said on “Hannity and Colmes” Monday night. “It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss,’ and unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.”

So by taking umbrage at being called a ‘faggot’, John Edwards is admitting he’s gay! I only meant he was a wuss! Have you told your mother you’re gay, yes or no? Stop hitting yourself!

In fact, ‘faggot’ is offensive to gays. This author’s view is somewhat representative.

“Faggot,” is the “N”-Word to Gay People. It hurts as much. It is as discriminatory. It is as disparaging.

An aside: If you go on to read the article, please ignore the author’s etymology involving burning people. That’s a common misconception. In fact, our current usage of ‘faggot’ probably derives from its application to old women, perhaps because of their stick-bundle-carrying tendencies. One source from 1862 shows “She..struck at me, she did, the good-for-nothing faggot!” And then the female term was applied to homosexual men. This is a common pattern; words like ‘gay’ and ‘fairy’ have a similar history.

The Republican presidential nominees have condemned Coulter’s usage, but she’s unrepentant.

“Apparently our top three Republican nominees aren’t that smart,” Coulter said. “And by the way, if they’re going to start apologizing for everything I say, they better keep that statement handy cause there’s going to be a lot more in the next year.”

Oh, goody.

Swearing class observations

1 March 2007 / / 11 Comments

The swearing class has wrapped. I have to say, it was a lot of fun to teach. Part linguistic dissection, and part rowdy storytelling.

The students made a lot of interesting observations. One student, a mother, related her children’s reaction when she told a salacious joke over dinner. From anyone else, the kids would have enjoyed it, but from Mom it was an absolute clanger. It made me reflect on the social aspect of language. To other people, we seem to be these bundles of expectations. When we step outside the expectations of others, social incongruity is sure to follow.

Most of the words we consider ‘dirty’ were once matter-of-fact terms, with no inherently obscene connotations. These words wouldn’t become taboo until the Puritan crackdown of the 1600s. Insults are an exception. One gentleman researched the epithet ‘raghead’, and found that it dated from British involvement in India, recently dusted off and used for Muslims. In many ways, the class was a chance to see the sad history of how we torment each other with our words.

Even more sobering for me was a discussion of how blasphemy was punished in Colonial America.

2. If any pson wthin ye Province professing ye true God shall wittingly and willingly presume to blaspheme the wholly name of God, Father, Son or Holy Ghost, wth direct, express, presumptions or high-handed blasphemy, either by willful or obstinate denying ye true God or his creation or Governmt of ye world, or shall curse God, Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, such pson shall be put to death. Levit. 24: 15 and 16.

Now imagine that. A capital offense, and you didn’t even have to swear. All you had to do was, in essence, be an atheist.

I hope this is enough to disperse the lie that America was established as a land of religious liberty. America was established by Puritans, a bunch of religious froot-loopers so fanatical that no one else could stand them. They happily bored awls through people’s tongues, branded their foreheads with a B, and killed them for using certain God-words outside of a religious context. How many people were tortured and killed for their words and opinions in order to assuage the Biblical god?

America wouldn’t become a land of religious liberty until a bunch of free-thinkers, deists, agnostics, and atheists established the Constitution and dragged the nation out of the muck of Puritanism.

Finally, to my Christian readers: when you hear people arguing that America is a Christian nation (as they seem to), ask yourself if this is the kind of Christianity you want. There are many types, and you may not get to select your favourite flavour. In view of the punishments mentoned above, the wall of separation between church and state starts to look better and better.

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