A Computer Learns ‘Amo, Amas, Amat’
Long before AI could write a poem, the pioneers of computational linguistics took on a monumental task: teaching a room-sized computer grammar. This is the story of their work in…
Tag: ai language
The Dad Who Taped 90,000 Hours of Baby Talk
What if you could record every moment of your child's life to understand how they learn to talk? MIT researcher Deb Roy did just that, wiring his home with cameras…
Deconstructing a Fake Review
Ever wonder if that glowing five-star review is too good to be true? The secrets of deceptive writing are often hidden in plain sight, embedded in the very words and…
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…
Tech for Documenting Language
Forget the weathered notebook and tape recorder. Modern linguists are deploying a high-tech toolkit to document endangered languages, using portable ultrasound to image the tongue in motion and photogrammetry to…
The ‘Gavagai’ Problem: How We Map Words to Reality
Imagine a speaker in a new language points to a rabbit and says "gavagai." How do you know if it means "rabbit", "animal", or even "dinner"? This famous linguistic puzzle,…
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…
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…
Error Cascades: One Typo, System-Wide Failure
How can a single misplaced comma bring down an entire software system? This piece explores "error cascades" from a linguistic perspective, showing how the strict, unforgiving grammar of programming languages…
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…
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…
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…
Future of Language: AI & What’s Next
Artificial intelligence is not just a tool; it's actively reshaping the very fabric of human communication. From real-time translators that capture cultural nuance to the emergence of new "digital dialects",…
The Crossword’s AI Ghostwriter
Modern crosswords are not just a product of human ingenuity but a sophisticated collaboration with AI. This "ghostwriter" in the machine uses vast lexical databases and powerful constraint-satisfaction algorithms to…
Your Next Career: The AI Conversation Designer
Ever wonder who teaches Alexa to understand sarcasm or helps a banking chatbot sound reassuringly professional? Meet the AI Conversation Designer, a burgeoning career where your expertise in pragmatics, syntax,…
AI as Cryptographer: The New Codebreakers
From ancient scrolls to encrypted data streams, codebreaking has always been a linguistic puzzle. Now, a new kind of cryptographer has entered the fray: Artificial Intelligence. Discover how Large Language…
Linguistic Steganalysis: Detecting Hidden Data
While steganography is the art of hiding messages in plain sight, linguistic steganalysis is the science of finding them. This practice moves beyond searching for hidden pixels in images and…
Entropic Linguistics: Measuring Information
Claude Shannon's information theory provides a mathematical lens to view language's predictability, a concept known as entropy. This predictability, or low entropy, is why certain letter and word sequences feel…
The Grammar of AI Art Prompts
Prompt engineering for AI image generators is more than just typing words; it's an emergent, functional language. This new "Prompt-ese" has its own syntax, vocabulary, and grammar, developed by users…