Zellig Harris! Sweet!

"This is an alpha version of the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which is the largest structured corpus of historical English (or any language, for that matter)." -- Horrific web interface (terrible use of frames) but awesome tool nonetheless.

[JSTOR: Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1978), pp. 1-20]

"(I once offered to put five dollars in the tips jar at the Stevenson College Coffee House at UC Santa Cruz if they would stop playing the Van Morrison CD they had put on. They did, and I did. So his music has negative cash value for me: I have actually paid money to not hear it.)" -- It's like Geoff Pullum has been reading Andrew Gelman (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/there_is_no_uti.html)

I was listening to a description of a paper Darwin wrote, "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," about the development of his own son over his first four years, and comparing it to observations he had made earlier about a baby orangutan. At some point, I'd like to come back to this and track down that paper...

"The one positive conclusion from Fish's work that I believe I've grasped, so far, is the crucial role of what he calls "interpretive communities" in providing enough of a shared context — even if ephemeral and unfounded — for some minimal communication to take place. So it's ironic that he so completely fails to understand Kempson's work in the context of her native interpretive community." --- That sound you hear is Stanley Fish getting smacked down *with logic*. (That is to say, not only is it a logical smackdown, but its actual performance includes a prominent use of the phrase, "model theory.") Also, the Kempson article is really good.

Saw Mark Johnson give a talk about "Adaptor Grammars" (man, that 'o' really bothers me) two days ago. It turned out to be ... an extremely boring talk, although the idea itself seems modestly interesting and it included several reasonable animations of hierarchical Chinese Restaurant processes that were modestly illuminating. At any rate, I sat in the back, doodled on my notebook, and started to idly wonder if issues of "frequentist consistency" for this sort of learning process had been examined (or were even worth examining) at all...

The regularization of irregular verbs, and the death of old words. I remember reading about this (on the Language Log, probably?) when it was published.

Word-frequency models for P(default), based on loan applications from P2P lending sites. Filing this away for use at a later date, when (a) I have more money, and (b) it wouldn't be insane to lend it to somone on "a P2P lending site."

An excerpt of a description of Kenneth Pike eliciting information about a new language from a native speaker without a translator -- "monolingual elicitation." Benzon at the Valve links to this, asking "what did Pike know that Quine didn't?" But that seems like a complete misreading of Quine, who's describing how the narrowing process (I think he terms this, asking "ostensive" questions) narrows down some intermediate translation without ever permanently settling the question. Would someone like Pike ever really dispute that? Anyway, I think language-learning-games like this are probably a great lab for thinking about science too -- "nature" as the native speaker.

"In my view, there is no sense in trying to develop a taxonomy of possible semantic relations that noun-noun compounds can express, given that one of them would apparently have to be a relation that permits N1 N2 to hold of a person x iff N2 is the name of the relation that x bears to some person y such that y was involved in an incident in which an object of the type N1 played a salient role. Define the notion "natural semantic relation" as you will, this surely isn't one."

The WordNet database files are (a) text files, but (b) are indexed by byte-offsets. I can't tell if this is hideous or hilarious (probably both).

Via the Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=252
Includes an analysis of American Supreme Court recordings, although "Clarence Thomas didn't speak often enough to be included in the analyzed data."

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 495, Telescience: Scientific Communication in the Information Age (Jan., 1988), pp. 73-83

Several links to the controversy over the Piraha.

Paper by a student down the hall from me, and Michael Collins downstairs. And what *I* wonder is how one might think of applying techniques like this to biological sequences.

The OED (and others) on the origins and use of the word "modulo," which I first heard as a college student from my undergraduate advisor. Not much discussion of the mathematical context, but...whatever.

"XLE consists of cutting-edge algorithms for parsing and generating Lexical Functional Grammars (LFGs) along with a rich graphical user interface for writing and debugging such grammars."

Faculty member, NYU Linguistics department. Co-author of 2006 paper with Bernardi that looks interesting.

Homepage for the guy who created the govtrack.us site.

A set of links to NLP resources: papers, programs, and datasets.

An article from the Atlantic Monthly in 1983, by linguist and Language Log contributor, about language and grammar, prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.

"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds."