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The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad is an annual competition open to US high school students that introduces kids to computational linguistics at a much younger age than people normally hear about it. I didn’t hear about CL until I was three years into my undergrad program. The instant I did hear about it, I knew I wanted to do it. Most people I talk to about it, look like I’ve just uttered a phrase of Klingon. I suspect most people don’t hear about it at all, or if they do, it’s sometime during their undergrad program and not at the beginning, when they might be better able to plan their educational career path. Also, CL is pretty much a graduate program and rarely taught before then. Granted, a lot of the maths involved are beyond what’s taught to high school students and early undergrads, but the linguistics is not. And thinking about linguistics computationally is not. So NACLO is doing an extremely valuable service which I support completely. And not just because one of my professors is one of the General Chairs of the organizing committee for it. She no longer can affect my grade and I have no need to suck up — so this is genuine. How’s that for full disclosure?

One of my google alerts popped up a post on a spam blog I tracked down to this original post, which talks about a lot of young kids doing some great things in science. In the post is an interview with last year’s winner, Adam Hesterberg. He said, “I’d never studied linguistics, and ‘computation’ sounded like boring calculation.” That reminded me of the fact that computation might mean a different thing for most people than it does for scientists. I’m no corpus linguist, so I’m not gonna try to find out right here. What I suspect is that computation has a more “hard work” connotation for people outside of science: it’s the “plugging and chugging” meaning. Inside science, it’s tacked onto the beginning of some other field to mean anything in that field that can be computed. Computational linguistics deals with the computable aspects of linguistic theories. A very quick search on wikipedia finds at least a dozen other computational fields:

• Computational biology
• Computational chemistry
• Computational economics
• Computational electromagnetics
• Computational engineering
• Computational finance
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Computational mathematics
• Computational mechanics
• Computational particle physics
• Computational physics
• Computational statistics

Is it a good idea to use this name when approaching high school students? What about language technologies? Well, the competition isn’t about language technologies, it’s about critical problem solving in a linguistics setting. And trying to fit that into a competition name isn’t going to work, either. North American Critical Problem Solving about Linguistics Olympiad (NACPSLO)? It makes me think of narcolepsy.

So my proposal is North American Logic and Language Olympiad (NALLO). It’s easy to say (rhymes with hallow) and accurately describes the subject matter. Plus, I think it has broader appeal. A lot of kids are interested in logic, language, or both. It shakes free of the negative connotation of computation and draws kids where they can be introduced to it a little more easily. The downside is that it doesn’t mention linguistics directly, so that might trouble some people who are a little more traditional about their outreach.

What do you think?

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Apparently, I run a rather clean shop. Whodathunkit. And probably most of the cussing comes from my posts on brainfuck.

[Via]

It’s a morning of fun new words! First I hear greenwashing on the Today Show, which Donna likes to wash while she eats brekkie. Then, Language Log delights me with nanoblahblah, henchgoon, and celebufreak. Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, twitters words of the day so I also got a nice infusion when I examined her twitter feed for the past week or so. A few selections I particularly like that she found: paracosm, yostelumpet, and anthroponymy. And now for the definitions!

• anthroponymy - the study of the names of human beings [emckean@twitter]
• celebufreak - a freak with fame (e.g. Kim Kardashian) [Wordlustitude]
• greenwashing - marketing a product as green when it’s really not [Today show]
• henchgoon - alternate term for administrative assistant or “assistant of doom” [Wordlustitude]
• nanoblahblah - very, very tiny nonsense (nanotechnobabble) [Wordlustitude]
• paracosm - a private imaginary world, esp. made by children to escape harsh circumstances (think Pan’s Labyrinth) [emckean@twitter]
• yodelumpet - a singing style that combines yodeling and Louis-Armstrong-style trumpet-like sounds [emckean@twitter]

Please note that the twitter links are stable in terms of link permanence, but are unstable in twitter’s ability to serve up the page. So if at first you get a bizarre message with birds, try again. This has also led to the re-discovery of the most excellent Wordlustitude site. I had seen a while ago but for whatever reason didn’t subscribe to it. This has been remedied, and if you like neologisms, I recommend you do the same.

There is nothing unusual about verbing nouns in English.  Despite the fact that your English teacher may have told you not to do this, it is common practice, especially on the intarwebs.  Verbing brand names to mean the primary action performed by the chief product of that brand is less common, but we all know about “googling.”  Just sitting here, trying to drink my morning coffee, I couldn’t come up with another example.

But what got me thinking about this is another example used in today’s User Friendly.  One character says,

“You’re gonna ebay it to goths, aren’t you.” [emphasis mine]

I had never heard the brand name ebay used in verb form, meaning to sell something on ebay (the primary function of their chief product).   It is not uncommon, though.  Searching the Google for +”to ebay it”, I found that at least 10% of the top few pages of results were just this construction (versus “to ebay.  It …”).  I estimate from that there are about 19,000 uses of ebay as a verb in this context, and no doubt many others in variations (e.g. “I ebayed my watch”).

Another example that just occurred to me, but which is pretty artificial, is to twitter, meaning to post something on Twitter.  I say this is artificial because Twitter openly encourages and suggests this terminology.  It was not an emergent construct, but an imposed one.  It has been adopted by the overwhelming majority of users, though.  [follow me on twitter]

So here is my question:  does this only work for Internet companies?  I’m probably forgetting some obvious brick-and-mortar company for which we have verbed their brand, so please tell me if I have.  Or is it that Internet companies are especially conducive to this construction because so many Internet companies start off with only one service and become known by that service.  Google is search, ebay is selling crap through auctions, twitter is … twittering.   If this only works for Internet companies, why did we start doing it in the first place?

And I just came up with a brick-and-mortar example:  hoover.  You can hoover down a plate of food, meaning to suck something up like a champ.  But my classification still holds, that is the primary function of their chief product (or at least the main product that people know them by).  Marketing people have already taken this to heart, I’m sure.  You need an easy name that sounds like English.  Just like with scientific terminology, no one wants to Dinklefwat their dishes.

I find myself using dictionaries a lot. Because I generally subscribe to the view of language as a fluid construct embedded in the mind of individuals and as an emergent phenomenon of a group of speakers, I don’t believe dictionaries are the final arbiters of correct word usage. In high school, things were different. I remember having arguments over word meanings and then resorting to the dictionary to make claims such as “it can’t mean that” or “that word does not exist.” Now I find those statements to be rubbish. If a group of people uses a word a certain way to communicate (and they understand each other), then that is a correct usage of a real word. This is different than when I say “I sent my check to the university ombudsman” when I meant to say “I sent my check to the university bursar.” This case is an instance of performance failure, where I accidentally used the wrong word.

The dictionary I use most commonly nowadays is dictionary.com. Their advantage is the fact that they draw on many different dictionaries simultaneously (though the results are presented separately). You can see the definitions given by Random House, Merriam Webster, American Heritage, WordNet, and a bunch of others. I just noticed today that they have added the Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary. You are given the word in an array of languages including Arabic, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic, Hungarian, etc. Most common European languages are included and a few of the most common Asian languages. Noticeably absent is Swahili, nor is any other language from Africa included. Also included is the Online Dictionary of Computing, which is a nice touch. Look up the word tickle and you find a text editor for the Mac.

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The things Bush says are so awesome sometimes.  My new favorite quote is “Childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.” [source] At first the White House transcriptionists corrected the mistake, but then press secretary Dana Perino instructed them to include the mistake, saying that the integrity of the transcriptions is very important to her.  This is good.

Language Log brought this particular juicy quote to my attention and Mark Liberman has an interesting commentary on the nature of the grammatical mistake - one more common to children than adults.  He also has a clip you can listen to.  He goes on to say that Bush does pause after he says childrens but that there’s no indication he’s just made a planning mistake.  I’m not completely sure I agree here.  I don’t think he necessarily did, but it’s possible.  I’m curious whether he was reading from a teleprompter or piece of paper and misread it as children’s and then seeing the rest of the quote, paused because it didn’t parse at first and then plunged on ahead because he’s a public speaker and it’s better to just keep going than stop and visibly appear to be lost.

Anyhow, the interesting part of Liberman’s post is the reference to chilluns, which he attributes to some possibly fictional southern dialect.  It’s not fictional.  It’s called Gullah and it’s from around the Charleston area in South Carolina.  Interestingly, I have also heard some people use a similar form in the country around the midlands of South Carolina.  I’m not really sure how to transcribe it, but it’s sort of like chillren.  Unlike chilluns it’s usually not plural (at least not that I recall).  When I first heard it, I thought the speaker was joking and using covert nonsense speech, like many of the words my wife and I use together.   For example, Kek kek kek = Connecticut, Pennsyltucky = Pennsylvania (especially when referring to the more rural parts), and South Kakalakee = South Carolina.  (We didn’t make all those up, but they are parts of our private conversations.)

But you can actually find a lot of occurrences of chillren on Google, so it’s not all that uncommon.   It seems to appear in a lot of slave narratives (judging by the Google results), so it probably had its origins in the pre-Civil War era and has survived in some areas.

Language Log brought up the usage of the phrase another thing coming today.  This is the only way I’ve ever heard it or seen it used.  But it turns out, the original is another think coming.  The thing version is winning out on the interwebs, but the post on Language Log indicates that the two phrases may have been warring since their (mutual?) inceptions.  It’s no surprise to me that thing would replace think in this case, for simple phonological reasons.  The [k] in think is preceded by a voiced nasal sound (the vocal cords are vibrating) and then followed by a unvoiced velar stop (aka plosive, but essentially another [k] sound).  The phenomenon of assimilation occurs when a phoneme changes to reflect the surrounding phoneme(s).  In this case, the [k] probably originally became voiced, which would make it a [g] sound.  The [k] and [g] sounds are essentially the same, it’s just a difference in whether your vocal cords are vibrating.  So, assimilation generated thing instead of think in regular speech and since that is a well known word, people interpreted it as thing instead of think when they were first exposed to it.  From there it has been gaining steam.

Another interesting example of a similar nature is home in on versus the original hone in on.

Israeli startup Zlango is taking a different approach to mobile messaging and emoticons. Rather than using words that often are absolutely meaningless and incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with the orthographic conventions of texting (e.g. “idk”, “myob”), they have created an icon-based language that would theoretically be comprehensible to anyone. So here’s an experiment. Without looking at the Zlango site, what do you think this sentence says?

Keep in mind there is not a one-to-one correspondence from icon to word (that is, there may be more than one word per icon or more than one icon per word, and words or icons may be dropped). Of course, Zlango only has about 200 icons, so you are really limited on what you can say. However, it appears they are going to be adding a feature to create your own icon. If people start to use this and add their own icons, we could see a wiki-like explosion in the number of things that can be expressed.

In the news: Scientific American blog, Wired.

This past spring I worked on a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. To my knowledge, this has never been done using finite state transducers. As part of my search to find the current state of the art for this language, I emailed Professor Richard Hogg at the University of Manchester. He wrote the section of the Cambridge History of the English Language on Old English morphology. A lot of times, you’ll email a professor and it could take days for them to get back to you, especially if they are at a different university. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. But, Dr. Hogg was a very polite and helpful guy, saying my work sounded interesting and pointing me to the Stella group at the University of Glasgow. His section on morphology in the Cambridge History was also very helpful, so I felt quite grateful to the guy. I wish I could have known him better.

Read his extensive obituary in the Guardian.

I came across a story on NPR today about why women read more than men. They quote from Louann Brizendine who wrote the book The Female Brain. The issue of gender differences and the brain always starts fights. Men have larger brains and more gray matter, which handles information processing. Women have more white matter and thus more interconnectivity between parts of the brain. The prefrontal lobe in women is more densely packed with neurons, and that is the area responsible for judgment, planning and language. Here is a quote from the article:

“Girls have an easier time with reading or written work, and it’s not a stretch to extrapolate [that] to adult life,” Brizendine says. Indeed, adult women talk more in social settings and use more words than men, she says.

Woah nelly! Brizendine hasn’t been doing her reading, because tons of contrary evidence to this crap has been out for a while. And trying to find that link, I discovered that Language Log has already done a pretty extensive commentary on this article. When it comes to matters of language, it’s hard to scoop them. The long and the short of the Language Log commentary is that the so-called gap in fiction sales could be accounted for entirely by sales of romance books.

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I came across an interesting difference in usage between British and American versions of the word assurance. The word typically means a promise or a guarantee in American English. So when I came across this ad on the Scotsman it caught my eye. Hell yes I want my life assured! Turns out, to the Brits, it just means insurance. Pity.

Here is a word that has gone through the wringer in the past few decades. Originally it meant a monstrous offense or excessive wickedness (American Heritage). However, its similarity to the word enormous has caused it to be used by an ever growing number of people to mean immense size. With all things language, attempting to turn back the natural tide of almighty usage is futile. For example, the title of an article just posted on the National Geographic website is “Angkor’s Ancient Enormity Uncovered“. I was disappointed when the story wasn’t about a mass sacrifice or other such atrocity.

Now here is an interesting word. The Language Log has a few examples of its usage and a couple of theories as to how it came about. The first is that the archaic word howsomever, which was an alternate form for however, changed through metathesis to howmsoever. I’m more inclined to the theory that it is derived by analogy from whomsoever/whosoever. I can imagine a scenario where someone wants to drag out however to make what is about to be said more significant (or some such scenario). It seems like howmsoever would fill that need nicely. But who knows..

social operating system - n.  A social networking site like Facebook or MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities, including entertainment and shopping, to become a platform for online living.  (Wired News)

I’m always on the lookout for new words.  This one isn’t especially innovative, but the last phrase caught my notice.  Online living.  Indeed.  Now I like Facebook and actively maintain a profile as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends.  But online living?  I think that day is still a long ways off.