The Red Squiggle: Linguistics of Spell Check
That familiar red squiggle under a misspelled word isn't magic; it's a marvel of computational linguistics. This post explores the hidden science behind your spell checker, from how it calculates…
Tag: computational linguistics
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,…
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…
Reading Speech: Secrets of the Spectrogram
What if you could see your own voice? Spectrograms, or "voiceprints," are powerful tools that turn the fleeting sounds of speech into detailed visual maps. By learning to read these…
The World’s First Word Processor
Before 'cut and paste' existed on a screen, there was the Friden Flexowriter, a revolutionary machine that used punched paper tape to edit text. Discover the story of this forgotten…
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 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 World’s Most Mysterious Book: Can Linguistics Ever Decipher the Voynich Manuscript?
Filled with otherworldly plants and an indecipherable script, the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript has stumped cryptographers for over a century. Linguistic analysis reveals that the text mimics the statistical patterns and…
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…
Building Languages for Machines: The Linguistic Principles Behind Programming Languages
We think of Python or Java as "computer languages," but they are fundamentally constructed languages built on core linguistic principles. This article explores the hidden grammar of code, from the…
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…
Reading the Knots: Quipu, the Inca’s Mysterious 3D Writing System
What if writing wasn't flat on a page, but a three-dimensional web of information you could hold in your hands? The Inca Empire's Quipu, an intricate system of knotted, colorful…
The Enduring Mystery of the Phaistos Disk: A Linguistic Enigma
For anyone with a passion for ancient civilizations and the mysterious languages they spoke, the story of the Phaistos Disk stands as an enigma unlike...
Competitive Linguistics: The Ultimate Challenge for Language Lovers
If you’ve ever been in awe of the world’s many languages, fascinated by the complexities and the beauty they carry, and dreamed of using this...
Resurrecting Dead Languages: A Journey into Linguistic Archaeology
Linguistics, in the simplest sense, is the study of languages. But what happens when the language itself has been lost to time, when there are...