computational linguistics

“Hello World”: The Birth of a Coded Ritual

The phrase "Hello, World!" is more than just the first program most coders write; it's a universal rite of passage…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

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…

6 days ago

A History of Parentheses

We use them every day to add an aside or crack a digital smile, but have you ever wondered where…

6 days ago

The Adlam Script: A Modern Alphabet for an Ancient People

For centuries, the Fula language, spoken by over 40 million people, lacked its own native script. In the 1980s, two…

1 month ago

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…

1 month ago

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…

1 month ago

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