AI’s Sign Language Problem
We've taught AI to understand our spoken words, but sign language presents a far greater challenge that goes beyond tracking hand gestures. Its complexity relies on a visual grammar of…
Tag: machine learning
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…
Language Carbon Dating: The Science of Glottochronology
Ever wonder how linguists estimate when languages like Spanish and French split from their common ancestor? The answer lies in a controversial method called glottochronology, which acts like a "carbon…
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…
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…
Speaking to Themselves: The Unsettling Rise of Inter-AI Languages We Can’t Understand
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…
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 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…
Will AI Translators Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete?
In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to communicate effectively is more critical than ever. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been...