This week I've been mostly reading ...

IBM computer Watson plays Jeopardy

2011-02-14T21:19:00.000Z

IBM are in the news again in relation to AI. Their computer (Watson) is playing in the American TV programme Jeopardy.

Review of UK copyright laws

2010-11-05T08:28:00.000Z

A change in fair use in UK law might help corpus-based language researchers?

BBC News: How do you pronounce 'H'?

2010-10-31T21:07:00.000Z

The British Library is carrying out a survey of how spoken English is changing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588

Fred Jelinek RIP

2010-09-29T14:02:00.000+01:00

It has been reported elsewhere (Google research blog, New York Times, Language Log, IBM Research) that Fred Jelinek passed away on September 14th, 2010. I heard Fred (at a talk in Prague I think) repeat his famous 'quote' about the accuracy of his MT system going up when the linguists left the room!

The Little Book of Sustainable Living

2010-08-28T23:11:00.000+01:00

Produced by the Recycling Forum in the Lancaster area. Lots of interesting tips in this booklet.

David Lodge: Deaf sentence

2010-08-21T16:56:00.000+01:00

And the other book I read on the beach (two books in a week!) was David Lodge's Deaf Sentence. Although the UK cover quotes the Guardian "Very funny" and the New Statesman "Seriously funny", I'd probably pick out the following key words: death, suicide and obviously deafness. Okay, so corpus linguistics gets a mention (page 32 in my edition).

Iain M Banks: Feersum Endjinn

2010-08-21T16:46:00.000+01:00

While sitting on the beach recently, I read Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks, recommended by Stuart. Okay, it did have something to do with work: one of the main character's thoughts are written in SMS-style shortenings and abbreviations.

What are you doing here?

2010-07-01T16:19:00.002+01:00

A fantastic montage of clips from Doctor Who over the last 11 doctors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtG5dK_HaGg

Thanks to Jam for spotting that one.

Libdem manifesto key concepts

2010-04-28T21:41:00.002+01:00

And finally the key concepts for the Libdem manifesto.

Labour key concept cloud

2010-04-28T21:38:00.003+01:00

And here's the key concept cloud from the Labour manifesto ... there seems to be much more variety of concepts here and hence the cloud is much bigger. I had to shrink it further to get it all in one screenshot.

Conservative key concept cloud

2010-04-28T21:33:00.003+01:00

In addition to key words, Wmatrix can produce key concepts by comparing a frequency list of semantic fields automatically tagged in the data with a reference corpus, again here the BNC written sampler. This shows statistically key concepts in the Conservative manifesto

TEI versions of UK election manifestos

2010-04-20T22:54:00.004+01:00

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in France with a laptop, Lou Burnard has created TEI encoded versions of the UK election manifestos, tagged and lemmatised them with TreeTagger. Download from http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2010/TEIversion/

Thanks Lou!

Updated Libdem manifesto and cloud

2010-04-20T11:31:00.004+01:00

Lou Burnard spotted some conversion errors in the Libdem manifesto (extra spaces after ligatures e.g. 'fi') and Martin has now fixed smart quotes to straight ones. The new text version of the Libdem manifesto is at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2010/ and here is the updated key word cloud. You'll notice the main difference is that "Britains" is no longer key because it was actually "Britain's" and the apostrophe now being fixed means that it combines its frequency with "Britain".

Libdem manifesto key words

2010-04-15T22:36:00.003+01:00

And finally the Liberal Democrat manifesto key word cloud.

Labour key word cloud

2010-04-15T22:33:00.003+01:00

And here's the Labour key word cloud ...

Conservative key word cloud

2010-04-15T22:24:00.005+01:00

Unlike tag clouds or those produced by Wordle where the size of a word depends on its frequency, the Wmatrix key word clouds show words where their size is related to their statistical keyness i.e. how different their frequency is from what it is expected to be (based on a large reference corpus). Here's the conservative key word cloud.

UK election manifestos 2010

2010-04-15T21:49:00.003+01:00

This week I've been reading the UK election manifestos, or rather I've set Wmatrix to read them for me. First, you have to convert the online versions in PDF or HTML into plain text. Saving automatically from Acrobat as plain text leaves unwanted headers and footers and some lost capitalisation. Thanks to Martin Wynne for editing the Libdem and Conservative files. I've edited the Labour manifesto by taking the HTML version from their website and marking the chapter boundaries with a pseudo-XML tag. The edited full plain text versions are available to download at: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2010/

Labour's manifesto is 29,508 words long. The Conservative manifesto is 27,562 words and the LibDem one is shorter at 18,433 words.

Next, I loaded the files into Wmatrix and compared them to a general reference corpus for written British English. Key word clouds coming up ...

Windows to mac tips part 6: control-alt-delete for OSX

2010-04-09T12:07:00.002+01:00

Two years later and I'm still finding out new shortcuts!

If you want the equivalent of control-alt-delete on OSX then use command-option-escape and you can force an application to quit.

NLP blog reports weird results in Google 5-gram list

2010-03-21T17:18:00.003Z

Has anyone else spotted similar stuff to this?

Recently Oliver Charles (an undergrad at Lancaster University) has been comparing Google, Bing and Yahoo word counts for several thousand single words and MWEs. Paper coming soon!

Windows to mac tips part 5: zip with password

2010-03-06T17:05:00.003Z

If you're used to Winzip or the Windows built in possibility to add a password to a zip file, then this can be done on OSX with "zip -e zipfile.zip /dir/files*" on the command line. You're then prompted for a password. To unzip, I've found it best to use Stuffit expander rather than the default archive utility.

Computing in the news

2010-01-09T10:02:00.001Z

AI and chatbots are made famous in a BBC News story about game design.

Apple Forum posts on iPod Touch crashing apps

2010-01-09T09:53:00.004Z

It seems that this is happening a lot with third party apps on the iPod Touch. It begins with one app crashing as soon as you open it and eventually all the other third party apps stop working. There are a lot of solutions offered on the forums here and here, but the only thing that worked for me was a complete reset.

The impact of "impact" on the humanities

2009-12-12T16:04:00.001Z

A recent article in the Times discusses these issues arising from the REF.

Windows to mac tips part 4: useful site

2009-12-12T15:43:00.001Z

I recently spotted http://www.macwindows.com/

Zip it, Block it, Flag it

2009-12-08T22:23:00.001Z

Internet safety lessons for primary schoolchildren are planned ...

IGF news story

2009-11-15T16:13:00.001Z

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) makes the news ... but probably not for what they expected?

Historical Thesaurus of English

2009-11-12T21:07:00.002Z

Last month, I attended the launch of the Historical Thesaurus of English. There's more about this direct from Christian Kay on the OUP blog.

New articles for the Corpora journal

2009-09-05T11:49:00.002+01:00

This week, I've been proof reading the new articles expected to appear in Corpora 4:2. They are:

Becoming a proficient academic writer: shifting lexical preferences in the use of the progressive

Stefanie Wulff and Ute Römer

Korean lexical bundles in conversation and academic texts

YouJin Kim

The making of a BNC customised spoken corpus for comparative purposes

Phoenix Lam

The development of a semantic annotation scheme for Chinese kinship

Yufang Qian and Scott Piao

REVIEW: Hundt, Nesselhauf and Biewer (eds, 2006) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi

Marina Santini

REVIEW: Biber (2006) University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan

How to reduce your carbon emissions by 10%

2009-09-01T09:16:00.000+01:00

Another interesting article from the Guardian

LU News: 30th anniversary conference for ICAME

2009-05-04T22:21:00.006+01:00

This LU news story explains what has been keeping me busy recently, including a great picture of Geoff at a previous conference.

BBC News: social networking sites monitored

2009-03-25T11:33:00.003Z

Would the government ask Royal Mail to keep track of the recipient of each letter or postcard that I send? More press reports on monitoring of the internet ... thanks to Patrick for spotting this one.

Oldest English words identified?

2009-03-01T11:21:00.002Z

There's been a flurry of reporting about this research at the University of Reading. Is this bad science, bad journalism or just a bad press release? Here are the links to:

1. University of Reading press release

2. Article in Nature (2007)

3. Language log coverage

4. BBC News coverage and interview on the Today programme

One thing it shows is how difficult it is to explain what we do in the corpus-based study of language. It should not be about whether I like the latest word that has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary, as I've been asked before!!

Can and should ISPs block child abuse websites?

2009-02-28T17:50:00.002Z

Plenty of comments on Rory Cellan-Jones' blog post about this topic with strong views on both sides.

The truth about recycling

2009-02-28T17:23:00.003Z

I spotted this interesting article on recycling in the Guardian this week.

European working time directive 2012

2009-02-15T17:44:00.002Z

Just spotted this note on Alan's blog about the end of the UK university if the 48 hour working maximum is applied. Of course I'm reading this on a Sunday evening :-)

If you use Google Reader to read blogs, have a look at the trends section and it'll tell you what time of day and what day of the week you read blog posts. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of blogs I read on a Sunday evening between 4pm and 11pm!!

Today is Safer Internet Day

2009-02-10T22:46:00.002Z

As reported by BBC News and elsewhere. For the main site, visit the InSafe homepage.

Why is it "Safer" and not "Safe"?

Windows to Mac tips part 3: switching between apps

2009-01-27T19:54:00.003Z

If you're used to alt-tab on Windows, then you can use cmd-tab on MacOSX to switch between applications. Note that Windows switches between all open windows for each application, whereas the Mac only switches between applications. If you wish to switch between windows within one application then you need cmd-backquote (cmd-`) although I've found that this doesn't work in all apps.

There are more MacOSX keyboard shortcuts on the Apple support site.

The music of my childhood

2009-01-19T22:07:00.003Z

Read about Tony Hart who died at the weekend and listen to The Gallery on Vision On music (aka Left Bank Two by the Noveltones)

Review of Office 2007 contextual spelling checker

2009-01-10T21:10:00.005Z

It's worth having a read of Thierry Fontenelle's commentary on Graeme Hirst's review of Office 2007 contextual spelling

checker to see what the trade off between precision and recall means for users of a word processor.

Developing your alter-ego online

2008-12-05T16:03:00.003Z

I spotted this in a strange place, but Computer Shopper report that "psychologists have carried out studies that suggest that people are using social networking websites to develop an alternate identity, and are gradually growing into the personas they create. They explained that social networking sites are beginning to serve as a self-development tool for young people discovering their own identities."

From this I found a link to the papers from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, for the academic reports behind the news.

BBC News: Pupils can beat safe net filters

2008-12-04T09:22:00.000Z

According to Ben Geoghegan: Pupils are using special websites to hack out of their school computer network while in the classroom. They then access social networking sites and even hardcore pornography.

BBC News: School computer firewall fears

2008-12-04T09:18:00.001Z

There is concern some schools are not doing enough to stop students accessing unsuitable websites.

Settlement of the lawsuit against Google for its Book Search program

2008-11-15T19:51:00.004Z

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities blog reports his first impressions of the Google Books Settlement. The agreement focusses on in-copyright but out-of-print books and on access to the Google Books collection via libraries ...

The Text Technologies blog focusses more on the authors' side of things ...

Gender analyser

2008-11-06T14:13:00.001Z

This site lets you test whether a blog has been written by a man or woman.

Windows to Mac tips part 2: internet shortcuts

2008-10-25T09:38:00.003+01:00

I've been used to dragging the icon to the left of the URL in a web browser to a folder and it gets stored as an internet shortcut on Windows. You can do the same in Safari on the Mac and it is saved as a webloc file. However, the URL part is stored in the resource fork. In order to get a more portable webloc file in which you can view the stored URL as plain text, you should drag the full text of the URL to Finder. This still results in a webloc file, but the URL is readable as plain text so that you can open the webloc file in a text editor.

There are some other solutions: storing the URL as text clippings rather than weblocs and converting weblocs to urls with Applescript and again.

How not to make PowerPoint slides

2008-10-19T22:08:00.002+01:00

There are a large number of these on You Tube, but this one is funny.

Thanks to Adrian for spotting this ...

BBC Magazine: Midweek quiz: Old computers

2008-10-15T21:54:00.001+01:00

You can test your knowledge of old computers at the BBC Magazine site.

Windows to Mac tips part 1: screen grab

2008-10-15T08:49:00.004+01:00

Since there is no handy "Print Screen" or "Prt Sc" button on a Mac, you need to know the following:

Command + shift + 3 = whole screen

Command + shift + 4 = select a section

The results are dropped onto your desktop in PNG format.

Friends have also recommended utilities such as "Grab" and "Onyx", but I haven't tried those yet.

Bash foreach equivalent

2008-10-13T15:52:00.002+01:00

I can never remember the bash equivalent of tcsh's "foreach", and now I need to remember it having moved over to my nice new shiny MacBook (did I mention that?).

There's a quick reference here at Mike's Blawg.

Instructions about moving Windows Outlook PST files to Mac OSX Mail

2008-10-12T17:49:00.003+01:00

After becoming the proud owner of a shiny new black MacBook recently, I've been reading up about switching email from Windows Outlook (2003) to Mac OSX Mail. Demdike has some done some research on switching from Outlook to Mail via Thunderbird. My plan A for now involves using VMware Fusion to get Office 2007 running on the Windows virtual machine that I've installed. This seems to be the most pain-free way of switching email over for now. Plan B (medium term) is to actually move over to using the Mac proper for email.

Tim Showers' visualisation strategies

2008-09-28T20:53:00.003+01:00

Tim looks at a collection of different visualisation techniques.

Thanks to Adam.

Instructions on how to build a Lego Wall-E

2008-09-28T15:06:00.000+01:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/perayson/HowToBuildALegoWallE

designed by Jamie.

Authorship identification in the news

2008-09-14T20:06:00.002+01:00

Spotted on Language Log:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=573

BBC News: The case for forensic linguistics

THES: research council success rates

2008-09-06T20:19:00.001+01:00

By university:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403263&c=1

and by research council:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403255&c=1

THES: Do lecturers have a summer holiday?

2008-09-06T20:16:00.000+01:00

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403405&c=1

About the end of the world in 5 days

2008-09-05T13:41:00.002+01:00

... when we all disappear into a man made black hole!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7548994.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468966.stm

The schedule is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/programmes.shtml

The switch on is due at 8:30 BST. Andrew Marre will be the first to go if a black hole is created.

Have a look at the Q&A on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/asktheexpert.shtml

The answer to the question “Black Holes and matter” doesn’t fill me with confidence!

BBC News: 10 items or fewer

2008-09-01T17:13:00.000+01:00

Grammatical correctness gone mad?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7591905.stm

BBC News: OCR spelling and bad spelling

2008-08-18T16:37:00.003+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7567692.stm (OCR solution) spotted by Alistair and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7546975.stm (Bad spelling should be 'accepted')

BBC News: Paedophile 'librarian' is jailed

2008-08-18T13:46:00.000+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7561915.stm

New and interesting uses for webmail...

2008-07-23T22:21:00.002+01:00

http://chuqui.typepad.com/chuqui_30/2008/07/new-and-interes.html thanks to Adam

Photos with translationese

2008-07-21T17:21:00.003+01:00

Courtesy of Flickr bad translations and Chinglish groups:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/badtranslations/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6052800.stm
http://www.flickr.com/groups/chinglish/

Review of an academic Doctor Who book

2008-07-21T16:57:00.003+01:00

Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who
Edited by David Butler

The glowing review is at the Behind the Sofa blog.

BBC reporter's blog: 10 reasons to cheer our teenagers

2008-07-14T21:51:00.001+01:00

A positive news story at last?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/07/10_reasons_to_cheer_our_teenag.html

Sentiment analysis of twitter

2008-07-10T16:56:00.001+01:00

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_likely_acquired_by_twi.php

thanks to Adam.

Word clouds of Doctor Who New Series

2008-07-06T17:35:00.001+01:00

http://sandwich.ukcod.org.uk/~matthew/subtitles/

Spotted on Paul Cornell's blog

BBC News: Baby's bottom censored by store

2008-06-26T14:09:00.001+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7474968.stm

BBC News: Adults 'scared to go near kids'

2008-06-26T10:09:00.000+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7474692.stm

Guardian: Regenerate! Fans revive 60s Doctor Who

2008-06-26T09:02:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/26/bbc.doctorwho

Computational Approaches to Measuring the Similarity of Short Contexts : A Review of Applications and Methods

2008-06-25T17:08:00.001+01:00

A paper by Ted Pederson (arXiv:0806.3787v1 [cs.CL]):

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3787

The Subtle Knife

2008-06-25T14:34:00.003+01:00

This morning at 6am I was mostly reading ... chapter 12 of The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman.

Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies

2008-06-22T12:02:00.001+01:00

A history of treemaps: (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/) by Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/)

BBC News: 'Oldest' computer music unveiled

2008-06-22T11:46:00.001+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7458479.stm

plus how the BBC reported the birth of "Baby" in 1948

Leadership and Diffusion in Online Communities

2008-06-22T10:17:00.003+01:00

David Huffaker's using text analysis methods such as LIWC and Wmatrix to analyse "leadership and diffusion in online communities by exploring the relationship between communication processes, social structure and language use".

http://www.davehuffaker.com/blog/?page_id=3