WIRED: AI Loves—and Loathes—Language. “The particular kind of data that foils AI more than anything is human language. Unfortunately, human language is also a primary form of data on the meganet. As language confounds deep-learning applications, AI—and meganets—will learn to avoid it in favor of numbers and images, a move that stands to imperil how humans use language with each other.”
ScienceDaily: A new and better way to create word lists. “Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly better than others.”
Engadget: YouTube reverses course on controversial swearing and monetization policy. “The new profanity rules YouTube introduced late last year are being relaxed — with an update outlining a less restrictive policy that will allow the use of moderate and strong profanity to be used without risking demonetization.” #FreeGrandmaPottymouth
CBS News: “Petfluencer” and “rage farming” among new words added to Dictionary.com. “The update, published on Feb. 28, includes 313 new words. Many words address modern situations. For example, ‘rage farming’ is the tactic of using inflammatory content to garner a response on social media and ‘pinkwashing’ refers to the way corporations superficially acknowledge and support LGBTQ+ rights while also supporting anti-LGBTQ causes.”
Decrypt: Don’t Call It ‘Crypto’: How Some Blockchain and NFT Projects are Rebranding. “Crypto—and all its associated jargon—are now toxic words. Where once simply adding the word ‘blockchain’ to your name increased your company’s valuation, now crypto, Web3, NFT and the rest of the buzzwords that conjured up images of a brave new world are, to paraphrase Charlie Munger, rat poison.”
MIT Technology Review: AI image generator Midjourney blocks porn by banning words about the human reproductive system . “The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts, MIT Technology Review has discovered.”
Emory University: Mellon Foundation awards Emory $2.4 million to advance Indigenous studies and knowledge with the Muscogee Nation. “The Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory University and the College of the Muscogee Nation (CMN) in Oklahoma a $2.4 million grant that will help develop collaborative and independent programs advancing Native and Indigenous Studies and the preservation of the Mvskoke language in a unique partnership between the two schools.”
Illinois News Bureau: Geography, language dictate social media and popular website usage, study finds. “In a new study, College of Media professors Margaret Yee Man Ng and Harsh Taneja show that many of the same social media platforms and websites are popular around the world, but how people use them remains vastly different based on their languages and geography.”
NewsWise: Bot gives nonnative speakers the floor in videoconferencing. “Xiaoyan Li, a doctoral student in the field of information science, used multilingual groups to test out the helpful bot – called a conversational agent – which was programmed to intervene after native speakers took six consecutive turns. The agent enabled nonnative speakers to break into the conversation, increasing their participation from 12% to 17% of all words spoken. While people who did not have English as a first language generally found the agent to be helpful, native speakers thought the intrusions were distracting and unnecessary.”
APN News: Indian English pronunciation added to the Oxford English Dictionary. “Pronunciation transcriptions and audio for over 800 entries particularly associated with Indian English, including desh (a person’s or a people’s native country or place of origin), diya (a small cup-shaped oil lamp, typically made of baked clay, often used on religious occasions such as the Diwali festival), bachcha (a child; also a young animal), almirah (a free-standing cupboard, wardrobe, or other storage unit), and bindaas (bold; independent; admired; fashionable), are now available in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).”
Datamuse Blog: Our 2022 Waterloo co-op term: In which organising words is a labour of love!. “This past Fall, Datamuse hired three talented computer science students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Over the course of their three-month co-op they improved our word-finding apps and built a new game. These projects required a diverse set of skills, spanning topics in natural language processing (NLP), data visualization, distributed data processing, design, and web application development. In this post, we will showcase eight of the projects the students completed during the Fall term.” I use the Datamuse API for one of my Search Gizmos, Smushy Search. If you like words and word games, you definitely need to check out the Datamuse site.
Sydney Morning Herald: ‘An ethical and moral imperative’: One woman’s quest to save Australia’s dying songs. “Australia sits at the centre of an extraordinary web of linguistic and cultural diversity. More than 2000 of the world’s 6000 languages are spoken in Australia, the South Pacific and South-East Asia. Within the next 100 years, the number is predicted to dwindle to just a few hundred as communities age, traditions break down, and the climate crisis claims islands across the Pacific. The archive contains field recordings from the village of Tahal Nessa on Paama Island – a part of Vanuatu that is no longer inhabitable due to climate change.”
Aberystwyth University: Language teachers could ditch essays in favour of graphic novels. “… a team of Modern Languages academics are inspiring teachers and students to adopt new and creative ways of researching language and assessing language learning – through art. The team have launched the Creative Modern Languages Hub, a free online resource which provides examples of creative assessment and artistic research from the UK and beyond.”
Hold the Front Page: Former editor creates dictionary of “lost language of newspapers”. “Neil Benson has created a glossary of both current and extinct newspaper production terms after launching an appeal on Facebook for journalists to contribute to it. The glossary features dozens of terms used throughout the newspaper industry’s history and has been widely shared since being published on his blog.”
NPR: How ‘goblin mode’ became Oxford’s word of the year. “It’s mindlessly binge-watching television without worrying about the time. It’s eating snacks in bed without a care about leftover crumbs. And it’s wearing the same pair of pajamas all week while working from home. Welcome to ‘goblin mode.’”
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