The Mechanical Mouth: A History of Speech Synthesis
From the bellows-powered talking heads of the 18th century to the neural networks that voice our smart assistants, the quest to create an artificial voice is a fascinating story of…
Computational Linguistics
AI’s Low-Resource Language Crisis
AI models like ChatGPT can write poetry in English, yet they stumble over languages spoken by millions. This 'low-resource' language crisis is creating a new digital divide, silencing entire cultures…
The Art of Text Normalization
Before an AI can understand language, it must be cleaned. This post dives into text normalization, the unsung hero of computational linguistics that turns messy human text into pristine data.…
The Agglutination Barrier: Why AI Chokes on Words
Ever wonder why your AI translator can handle "I love you" but butchers a single complex word in Turkish or Finnish? The culprit is the "agglutination barrier", a phenomenon where…
The Invisible Labels: How AI Tags Grammar
Before an AI can understand language, it must first label every single word with its grammatical function in a process called Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. This foundational step teaches machines to…
AI’s Word Boundary Problem
To a computer, what exactly is a "word"? This seemingly simple question opens up the "word boundary problem", a surprisingly complex challenge in AI and linguistics. From handling compound nouns…
Five-Star Lies: The Linguistics of Fake Reviews
Ever wondered if that glowing five-star review is too good to be true? This article delves into the fascinating world of forensic linguistics to reveal the subtle linguistic clues—from pronoun…
10 Biases AI Learned From Our Writing
AI models learn language from us, warts and all. From reinforcing gender stereotypes in professions to assuming a Western-centric worldview, the vast library of our writing has baked subtle and…
Spot the Bot: 10 Cues of Deepfake Audio
As AI voice cloning masters the art of imitation, telling human from machine is becoming a crucial skill. This guide delves into 10 subtle linguistic and phonetic giveaways, from robotic…
Top 10 Linguistics Jobs for 2025
Think a linguistics degree only leads to a career in academia or translation? Think again. This article explores the top 10 booming careers for linguists in 2025, from designing AI…
Unmasking Authors with Math
Discover stylometry, the fascinating science of linguistic fingerprinting that uses statistical analysis to reveal an author's true identity. From solving the centuries-old mystery of the Federalist Papers to unmasking J.K.…
Why AI Can’t Tell a Good Joke
Artificial intelligence can translate languages and write essays, but why does it fall flat when it comes to telling a good joke? We explore the deep linguistic and cultural barriers…
The Sentence Tree: How AI Parses Grammar
Ever wonder how your smart assistant untangles a complex question or how machine translation works so well? It's not magic; it's grammar. This post delves into syntactic parsing, the process…
The Forest for the Trees: Inside Linguistic Treebanks
Ever wonder how your phone understands complex questions? Behind every major advance in AI and search technology is a massive, meticulously crafted dataset called a treebank. This post provides a…
Recreating Ötzi the Iceman’s Voice
Scientists have peered into the life of Ötzi the Iceman, learning what he ate and how he died. Now, thanks to CT scans and digital modeling, they have recreated the…
The Red Squiggle: Linguistics of Spell Check
That familiar red squiggle under a misspelled word isn't magic; it's a marvel of computational linguistics. This post explores the hidden science behind your spell checker, from how it calculates…
AI’s Linguistic Blind Spots
AI language models can write poetry and translate languages, but their impressive abilities mask significant linguistic blind spots. Inheriting biases from their training data, these systems often perpetuate gender stereotypes,…
Hey Siri: The Unwritten Grammar of Voice Commands
Have you ever noticed you talk to Siri differently than you talk to a person? We've developed a unique "Machine Speak"—a stripped-down, command-based language that reveals a lot about our…
Teaching AI Emotion: The Linguistics of Sentiment Analysis
How do we teach a machine to understand sarcasm or the subtle disappointment in a 'fine' review? This exploration delves into the linguistics of sentiment analysis, revealing how programmers and…
How Search Engines Read Your Mind: The Linguistics of Search
Every time you use a search engine, you're interacting with a sophisticated linguistic machine that does more than just match keywords. This post demystifies the linguistics behind search, explaining concepts…