Constructing a Field Dictionary from Scratch
Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary? From pointing at your nose to defining 'untranslatable' cultural concepts,…
Tag: corpus linguistics
Quantifying a Dialect’s ‘Distance’
How different are two dialects, really? Linguists can now answer that question with surprising precision. Discover the methods used to quantify the "lexical distance" between language varieties, including the powerful…
How Algorithms Read Your Resume
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) don't "read" your resume; they parse it using strict linguistic rules. To get past this digital gatekeeper, you must understand its language of keyword matching, semantic…
The Anti-Turing Test: What is Author Verification?
Author verification is the "Anti-Turing Test"—a field of linguistic forensics that determines if a specific person wrote a given text. Instead of asking "who wrote this?", it uses powerful techniques…
The Great Manx Comeback
In 1974, UNESCO declared the Manx language extinct with the death of its last native speaker, Ned Maddrell. Yet, this was not the end but the beginning of an extraordinary…
Digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls: An OCR Puzzle
Teaching a computer to read is simple, but what if the text is a 2,000-year-old, fragmented manuscript written in an archaic script? The digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls presents…
The Rebirth of Cornish
Once officially declared extinct after the death of its last native speaker in the 18th century, the Cornish language (Kernewek) has experienced a remarkable revival against all odds. This is…
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,…
The Linguist Who Caught the Unabomber
For 17 years, the Unabomber was a ghost, but his most powerful weapon—a 35,000-word manifesto—became his undoing. This is the story of how FBI linguist James Fitzgerald deciphered the unique…
The Politics of Dictionaries
Ever wonder who decides when a word like 'rizz' is official? This post delves into the surprisingly political world of dictionaries, exploring how lexicographers navigate cultural debates, from internet slang…
The Word Glue: Mastering Collocations
Fluency isn't just about the words you know, but how you stick them together. This article explores collocations, the natural word pairings that separate proficient speakers from native-sounding ones. Discover…
How Dictionaries Decide Who Lives and Who Dies
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…
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…
The Billion-Word Crystal Ball: How Corpus Linguistics Predicts the Future of Language
Ever wonder how new words like 'rizz' make it into the dictionary or why grammar rules seem to change over time? The answer lies in corpus linguistics, a fascinating field…
The Graveyard of Words: Who Decides When a Word Is Officially Dead?
For every new word that enters the dictionary, thousands of others fall into disuse and disappear into the graveyard of language. This linguistic culling isn't decided by a single authority,…
The Ghost in the Machine: How Linguists Teach Computers to Understand Ambiguity
Ever wonder how your phone knows you mean the band Queen, not a monarch? This post explores the linguistic challenge of ambiguity and the clever statistical methods, like n-grams and…