Suppose [hypothetically] I just received an email with the subject line "This is not an interesting email".

Would I read it?

Tags: brains, computers, silly, theory, words

arrived at jointly with clever coworker:

The Library of Babel demonstrates the flaws in targeting recall in information retrieval systems.

Tags: brains, theory, words

I am reminded by a friend (in a locked entry) of how great is the Peggy McIntosh essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Read the whole essay here [or PDF]. Some of the most thought-provoking parts:

( I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth. )

Sad but true that this is just as relevant as it was in 1988. No progress yet, as far as I can see; even more headway into this particular delusion. And of course the same things can be said for being male, masculine-presenting, straight, anglophone, and born into an educated upper/middle-class family. [and right-handed too, as _dkg_ might point out.]

And it seems particularly relevant in discussions like this one or this one when we consider what it means to be car-less, power-less, and hungry and thirsty in New Orleans this week.

[Update: This Alternet article was recently posted on the same subject (found via debunkingwhite). The comments from "liberals" reading an unashamedly left website and still resisting the thought that white people have responsibility for racism make me nauseous.]

Tags: culture, link, politics, theory

According to the New York Times, Gonzales is Seeking to Stem Light Sentences.

( geeky explanation behind the cut )
I owe this one to a transitive-closure labmate (he's not my labmate, but he's a former labmate of some of my labmates) who's now on the East Coast.

Tags: computers, silly, theory, words

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before on Livejournal, but solri's recent complaints about "Theory" rang a bell for me, and I thought I'd spread a useful metalinguistic concept around a little.

A-bleaching: the process by which an acronym or abbreviation moves from full compositionality to -- at the extreme end -- complete lexicalization.

Examples are fairly easy to find in technical work -- acronyms and abbreviations tend to be most obviously A-bleached when they are used in ways that are "redundant"; these are usually considered "anacronyms", a cutesy word describing accidental A-bleaching:

• laser radiation
• scuba apparatus
• the NATO organization

However, the new term "A-bleaching" is particularly interesting in the case of deliberate A-bleaching:

Deliberate A-bleaching: In particular, this term should be used to describe cases where the acronym is still obviously an acronym, but the community-of-use deliberately refuses (for "theoretical" reasons) to allow spell-out. Canonical examples of deliberate bleaching could be "move-alpha", "D-structure", and "PF", where "alpha" is (intra-discipline historically) derived from "A-structure" < "Argument structure", and "D-structure" < "Deep structure" and "PF" < "Phonetic form" --- and yet in all three cases, much contemporary theory denies any relationship of these terms to "deep"ness, "argument"s or "phonetics". The original, compositional meaning has been deliberately bleached.

Possible causes of deliberate A-bleaching:

1. Physics envy: by using things with obscure and technical-sounding names (like "a-bar movement" or "little v"), the field gains an aura of mathematical-seeming precision.
2. Attempts to retain results while changing theory: by retaining the conceptual slots of the older theories, the new theory may be trying to maintain the relevance of the older work, while proposing a new interpretation of that work.
3. Abstraction of two similar concepts: It's possible that (under some circumstances) two different phenomena can be unified together into a single concept. Assigning this concept an abstract name has worked for physics and math. But see #1 above.
4. Exclusion of outsiders: like any field, jargon serves two purposes. It can be used as a shorthand for useful packages of information, and it can be used as a shibboleth to exclude those who have not been inducted into the secret wisdoms. What better shibboleth than a collection of explicitly opaque symbols?

PS: yes, the term "A-bleaching" is my own invention.
PPS: yes, I am aware that the term "deliberate A-bleaching" is autological [as is my username], because it attempts to unify "acronym bleaching" and "abbreviation bleaching" (type #3 above).

Tags: theory, words

hotcha!

Whoa, the gauntlet is thrown. Richard Sproat to P&P/Minimalism: "put up or shut up": create a working P&P parser by 2008 or concede defeat.

And much very heated foofara then ensued.

I don't know how I missed all the fun before. Oh wait, yes I do. I've been kinda busy.

Quoth Sproat:

( the meat of the challenge )

...[the final zinger, emphasis mine:]

In fact, we would be delighted if someone succeeds in meeting our challenge. Such success would convince us that the P&P enterprise is, after all, a testable theory with genuine scientific content.

Tags: computers, theory
Current Mood: where's the popcorn?

My abstract for the UNLP workshop:

High-speed, high-entropy parse forest pruning with TUNGUSKA

[name]
Transylvania Polygnostic University
High Energy Magic Building

Genetic Algorithms are a popular theory, especially because we hear that genetics research is well-funded these days, and we suspect that government agencies often use bag-of-words models to make grant decisions. [Please take note that this research has no bearing on terrorism, biostatistics of terrorism, biostatistical terror, or the missing chemical weaponry in Iraq.] Growing sophistication in these algorithms has incorporated more and more analogies from evolutionary and molecular biology, including "crossover", "mutation", "island effects", "Dr. Moreau", and "wolf-boy".

[Alvarez and Alvarez] propose that the superorder /Dinosauria/ was erased by a long-distance movement phenomenon involving a kiloton ice comet, bringing in the advent of angiosperms known as "trees". Our TUNGUSKA system implements an analogous method for construction of syntactic trees designed to follow these trends. Our parser, implemented in SNOBOL, uses catastrophic destruction of a treebank or parse forest to provide an ecological niche for new trees, using a BLAST and PSI-BLAST pruning technique only recently approved by the Department of Energy.

We present current results in the first stages of this experiment, which has a large effective radius and has resulted in great support from nearby surviving faculty, who are happy to move their offices to accomodate our research. Many have issued supportive comments like "if you run that thing again you'll kill us all." They laughed at us at the academy, but who's laughing now?

Ah, I crack myself up.

Tags: brains, computers, silly, theory
Current Mood: silly

from here (thanks Lesley!): ( 'ware; Monty Python meets computational linguistics )

Tags: brains, computers, silly, theory
Current Mood: amused

A lab mate sent me the following question, passed on from a friend:

So, he's got a sentence "I like the book Gone with the Wind" and he's assuming he can figure out that Gone with the Wind is a title, so he can treat that as kind of a single blob. We're not sure how to parse the sentence, though. If it were something like "I like the red book", it would be easy - "the red book" is a noun phrase. We're not sure if Gone with the Wind would be considered some variant of a noun, though, or how the phrase "the book Gone with the Wind" works. The best idea we have is that Gone with the Wind is an appositive, or maybe even that "the book" is an appositive.

Well, dear readers, never hesitate to ask your friendly neighborhood Language Computeer. Neither rain nor snow nor thesis deadlines looming shall stop the mail. I wrote back as fast as I could, responding to the oddball wireloom projected on the cloudbank overhead:

yeah, the word "appositive" jumped into my head too.

Wikipedia seems to confirm this. The third example seems like a very close match to this case, which is described there as a "restrictive" appositive.

An interesting note here: there are in fact two classes of appositive phrases:

I like Vivien Leigh, the actress.   [non-restrictive]
I like the actress Vivien Leigh.    [restrictive]

note that non-restrictives always have commas and restrictives seem to disprefer them:

*? I like the actress, Vivien Leigh.
*? I like Vivien Leigh the actress.

I think that this comma distinction actually mirrors a prosodic difference between the two: the non-restrictive appositives seem to allow phrasal closure (a L- prosody break, to use ToBI annotations). But my opinions may be biased by years of literacy. Has anybody studied the prosody of appositives? oh, yes.

Tags: theory, words

Jason Eisner announces Unnatural Language Processing Workshop.

Eisner is just the kind of guy who would actually publish these papers, so if you have something in mind, send it!

Tags: computers, school, silly, theory
Current Mood: tired