ai language - LingoDigest

How Search Engines Read Your Mind: The Linguistics of Search

5 min read

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 like stemming, lemmatization, and semantic analysis in plain language. Learn how computers are taught to understand your intent, even when your query is misspelled or ambiguous.

AI Philosophy Psycholinguistics Computational Linguistics

The Chinese Room: Can a Machine Ever Understand?

7 min read

John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment poses a timeless challenge to the idea of a truly thinking machine. By exploring the crucial difference between manipulating linguistic symbols (syntax) and truly grasping their meaning (semantics), it forces us to ask a profound question: even if an AI can speak our language perfectly, will it ever truly understand?

Lexicography Linguistics Etymology

How Dictionaries Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

6 min read

Ever wonder how words like “rizz” become official while others fade away into obscurity? This post goes behind the scenes of lexicography, revealing the data-driven process that determines when a word is born and when it’s marked for death. Discover how you, as a speaker, hold the ultimate power in the life and death of language.

Computational Linguistics Technology AI Linguistics

Shattering Sentences: The Art of Tokenization

6 min read

Before any AI can understand language, it must first shatter sentences into pieces through a process called tokenization. This crucial first step is far more complex than it seems, presenting unique linguistic puzzles across different languages, from English contractions to German compound nouns and Chinese text that has no spaces. This invisible labor, where computer science meets linguistics, is the foundational work that powers our entire digital world.

Evolutionary Linguistics Computational Linguistics AI Future

Speaking to Themselves: The Unsettling Rise of Inter-AI Languages We Can’t Understand

6 min read

When two AI systems are tasked to work together, they often develop their own optimized, private language to communicate more efficiently—a language we can’t understand. This phenomenon of emergent AI communication offers a fascinating and unsettling look into non-human “cognition.” By exploring these alien tongues, we confront profound questions about the nature of language and the future of our relationship with artificial intelligence.