A Linguist?
March 7th, 2010I have a blog on computational linguistics (www.bakuzen.com) so I mostly keep that kind of thing away from here. But, it’s been my life for the past 6 months now. Now, having taken a few classes in psycholinguistics, speech pattern recognition, syntactic theory, and a general course that covered the broader scope of computational linguistics. I don’t yet, however, consider myself a computational linguist, much less a linguist, though one day I hope to be both.
When I was a teenager I didn’t consider myself “good at computers” even though I knew quite a bit about them. I could never solve problems like my brother could, but then one day I was called upon to solve a new and unique problem. I sat with my mom, who also is good at computers, for about an hour but the final solution was my own. It was clever, I must admit, and it wasn’t invasive to the computer in any way. From then on I considered myself “good at computers.” There may be a day in the future when a similar situation arises and only a true linguist would know the answer, and I would know that answer. Maybe someday.
I took a linguistics class, the only one I ever took at BYU, during my last semester. During that time I started looking at words and sentence structures differently. I remember when we were driving to Vernal, Utah and passed through a very small town that had an advertisement that said “Large Tree Sale!” and I couldn’t help but ask myself if it was the trees that were large or the sale that was large. From then on things were never the same. I suppose everyone in their given profession never looks at their field the same. A musician can’t hear music the same, though at the same time they are more appreciative of good music. The same bodes for artists, physicists, engineers, programmers, writers, farmers, everything.
Katie gets annoyed sometimes, I think, though she usually laughs when I point out sentence ambiguities. When there is spoken dialog, we have the way we think (that is, the way we perceive word meanings and how things could be constructed), there is the way the other person thinks, then we have the way we think the other person thinks and the other person has the way he thinks we think. Somehow in all of that our native language understanding is close enough to actually communicate. This is one of those NP-Complete problems that we’re not trying to solve per se, but at least we’re trying to do our best to find the patterns and generalize. With the amount of ambiguities we naturally throw into our speech, it’s amazing that we communicate at all.
Just for fun with ambiguities, look at these real newspaper headlines (taken from this website) :
Teacher strikes idle kids
Complaints About NBA Referees Growing Ugly
New Housing For Elderly Not Yet Dead
We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container
Dealers will hear car talk at noon
The disgusting thing is, once computational linguists map out the structure of a given language, a computer could come up with literally hundreds of ambiguities in a sentence and give a possible sentence parse for each of them. We have to figure out first, if the correct parse is among those, and second, if the computer decides that to be the best parse. We get very, very into depth in linguistics. We also use a lot of statistics to help us along the way. Some of us delve into psychology, specifically the psychology of language (acquisition, production, comprehension), to see if we can’t model how the human brain is getting the job of communication done and try to mimic that. I have to admit that I love doing this. It is way too interesting and too much fun.
But, at the moment, I appreciate the break. I am able to do some extra work, review some of the things for last semester, and start looking at things for this coming semester. My little family is growing too fast. It’s fun for a wannabe linguist to watch Elsa learn language. I can pinpoint the moments when she produces new language abilities, like using past tense verbs or plurals. Leah’s first two bottom teeth also poked through this past week signaling to me that she is growing up way too fast. She gets cuter by the day. Just look at Katie’s family blog to see the latest. We’re making leaps and bounds in starting Elsa on potty training as she has shown a lot of interest lately (and actually gave it a successful try this past week, sort of on accident). Now, if we could just get winter behind us and bring on some warmer weather, we could do something in the yard….






