Oh, dear.

"Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased --- the choice of words and sentence structure --- can affect this process. To this end, we develop an analysis framework and build a corpus of movie quotes, annotated with memorability information, in which we are able to control for both the speaker and the setting of the quotes. We find significant differences between memorable and non-memorable quotes in several key dimensions. One is lexical distinctiveness: in aggregate, memorable quotes use less common word choices, but at the same time are built upon a scaffolding of common syntactic patterns; another is that memorable quotes tend to be more general in ways that make them easy to apply in new contexts. We also show how the concept of "memorable language" can be extended across domains."

As Henry says, se non e vero, e bene trovato.

"I also worry that it is too easy to find correlations of this kind, and we don't have any idea just how easy until a concerted effort has been made to show that the spurious ones are not supportable. For example, if we took "has (vs. does not have) pharyngeal consonants", or "uses (vs. does not use) close front rounded vowels", would we find correlations there too? I have some colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh, within Simon Kirby's research group, who have run some informal experiments on the data Chen uses to see if dredging up spurious correlations of this kind is easy or hard, and so far they have found it jaw-droppingly easy. (I won't say any more, because I am in the weird position of producing unrefereed telegraphing of unrefereed and informal objections to an unrefereed and unpublished working paper, and it's all getting a bit too weird for me.)"

How many languages are there in Europe? Order of 10^2. How many variables can an economist get cross-country data on? Again, order of 10^2. How many discriminable syntactic features do languages have? Easily order of 10^3 if not come. Conclusion: this is not what I mean when I say that economists should do more data-mining.

Massively-hyped paper trying to model language history using lightly-repurposed biological models comprehensively debunked by very careful and linguistically-informed data analysis. One of the authors of the debunking shows up in the comments, and says:
"Finally, regarding press; a few news organisations were interested in the initial pitch, but lost interest when they realised that we didn't have a good story here about human origins."

"The organization of information within science can be investigated in a principled way through analysis of science language. The restricted use of language in science enables description of the informational structure of science and of particular subfields, with strong similarities to structures in mathematics and programming languages. This result rests on decades of research into the relation between form and content in language, based on an information-theoretic approach to the structure of information. Examples are provided from immunology and the social sciences. Practical applications include storage of science information in databases, indexing the literature, and identification and resolution of controversy."

Dehaene is a good scholar, but the abstract is very surprising to me, and the fact that it's contributed to PNAS (rather than properly refereed) is a Bad Sign.

New-ish BBS article claiming there isn't any universal grammar, merely several stable strategies in a sort of evolutionary game.

Yet another methodological EPIC FAIL.

"Speakers' stories about language shift in Bergamo, a Northern Italian town, are reflective of larger sociocultural changes and negotiations over tradition. The article examines how Bergamasco residents conceptualize time to construct a past of poverty in contrast to a prosperous contemporary world, taking up various affective stances toward these socioeconomic and linguistic shifts. Nostalgia plays a central role in speakers' focus on certain socioeconomic shifts. Analyzing temporality in and through linguistic ideology, the article contributes to debates on language shift, cultural change, and socioeconomic transformation." --- My mother grew up in Bergamo. (Though they moved there when she was ~10.)

"The ReadMe software package for R takes as input a set of text documents (such as speeches, blog posts, newspaper articles, judicial opinions, movie reviews, etc.), a categorization scheme chosen by the user (e.g., ordered positive to negative sentiment ratings, unordered policy topics, or any other mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of categories), and a small subset of text documents hand classified into the given categories. If used properly, ReadMe will report, normally within sampling error of the truth, the proportion of documents within each of the given categories among those not hand coded. ReadMe computes quantities of interest to the scientific community based on the distribution within categories but does so by skipping the more error prone intermediate step of classifing individual documents. Other procedures are also included to make processing text easy."

I have been meaning to read this since 1999 or so.

"Historical linguistics needs procedures to evaluate the similarity between languages through the comparison of specific word lists drawn from the whole vocabulary. The main issue is to evaluate a fair threshold for the number of similar items beyond which it is sensible to reject the hypothesis of chance similarity. After a short review of papers dealing with that problem, in this paper an extension of those methods is proposed which exploits available data in a more efficient way. In particular, the exact distribution of the new test statistics is calculated and the power of the new procedure is compared with the power of the existing method."

Having read the papers and re-implemented the method, I now concur with Mark: this is an methodological EPIC FAIL.

Later: I agree with a correspondent that "demolished" is too strong, but the key observation is that Wallace completely fails to get _why_ linguists take the position they do, which is not some perverse antinomianism but that they want to understand what people actually do.

Geof. Pullum blasts Strunk and White. But you read languagelog already.

"This paper analyzes communication with a language that is vague in the sense that
identical messages do not always result in identical interpretations. It is shown that
strategic agents frequently add to this vagueness by being intentionally vague, i.e. they
deliberately choose less precise messages than they have to among the ones available
to them in equilibrium. Having to communicate with a vague language can be welfare
enhancing because it mitigates conflict. In equilibria that satisfy a dynamic stability
condition intentional vagueness increases with the degree of conflict between sender
and receiver."

The central role of Chinese in this graph is highly suggestive.

"English texts are larger than their Chinese counterparts by a factor of between 1.37 and 2.27 before compression, or 1.19 to 1.41 after compression."

"Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't been each other's First Contacts. Virgin civilizations, groping each other in the dark."

Surprisingly sane; notes at http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2006-05.html

IPAM workshop on the mathematics of search and knowledge discovery, with links to slides and/or audio for some talks

Sperber & Wilson's excellent book, on sale

"And I tell you, artificial intelligence is a false god that provides correlative and not causal models of language acquisition. The infallible methodologies are the comparative study of world languages and lesion analyses of those who must be treated wit