Em Dash vs En Dash: A Tale of Two Lines
One is the width of an 'm', the other an 'n'—and writers have argued over them since the days of hot-metal printing. This deep dive into the dash family traces…
Tag: chatbot
How a Machine Learns to Hear
Go inside your smart speaker and discover how it turns sound into text through the lens of linguistics. Explore the core components of Automatic Speech Recognition, from acoustic models that…
AI’s Tone Shift: The Linguistics
The startlingly human new AI voices are more than a programming feat; they represent a breakthrough in computational prosody. Linguistics teaches us that the "music" of our speech—its rhythm, stress,…
The Ghost in the AI: Rediscovering Linguistics
We think of AI models as magical black boxes, but what if they're simply rediscovering the rules of language that humans have known for centuries? This post explores how a…
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…
The Chinese Room: Can a Machine Ever Understand?
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…
Shattering Sentences: The Art of Tokenization
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…
The Unseen World of Linguistic Annotation: The Human Hands Behind AI Language Models
Before an AI can understand language, a human has to teach it. This work is done by linguistic annotators, the unsung heroes who manually tag text with grammatical and semantic…
The ELIZA Effect: Why We Talk to Chatbots Like They’re Human
Have you ever found yourself saying "please" and "thank you" to a chatbot or voice assistant? This is the ELIZA effect, our tendency to unconsciously attribute human-like intelligence and empathy…
Harnessing AI Technologies for Personalized Language Learning
In an era where communication has become global and instantaneous, learning languages has never been more relevant. Traditional methods of language acquisition, though still effective,...