7 posts found.
June 26, 2015
In its reporting on yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that Justice Scalia’s dissent is based on a profound misunderstanding of how language works. Justice Scalia would have it that “words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not...
September 29, 2014
My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of....
June 10, 2014
…that's not Turing's Test… “Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission. There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a program has passed the Test. The program in question is called "Eugene Goostman" and...
January 03, 2013
...our little tiff in the late 18th century... "NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art: Washington Crossing the Delaware" image by flickr user wallyg. Used by permission. I'm shortly off to give a talk at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (on why open access is better for...
October 16, 2012
Karen Spärck Jones, 1935-2007 In honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2012, I write about the only female winner of the Lovelace Medal awarded by the British Computer Society for "individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of Computing". Karen Spärck Jones was the 2007 winner of...
June 16, 2012
...the Golem... Image of the statue of the Golem of Prague at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter of Prague by flickr user D_P_R. Used by permission (CC-BY 2.0). Alan Turing, the patron saint of computer science, was born 100 years ago this week (June 23). I’ll be attending the...
July 18, 2011
Grégoire Bouillier I used to use as my standard example of why translation is hard — and why fully automatic high-quality translation (FAHQT) is unlikely in our lifetimes however old we are — the translation of the first word of the first sentence of the first book of Proust's Remembrance...
