Dictionary Society of North America

On forensic linguistics

An article by Jack Hitt in the 23 July issue of the New Yorker magazine, "Words on Trial," discusses the state of forensic linguistics, particularly its role on the witness stand, and briefly profiles DSNA member Ron Butters as a skeptical voice about the field's accuracy. The article is available here; you have to be a subscriber to access it, however. The article mentions the famous "devil strip" illustration of the power of American regional English, but unfortunately includes no shout-out to DARE. 

Dictionary from Google image search

Two U.K. artists, Felix Heyes and Ben West, have created a dictionary of roughly 21,000 images, compiled by using the first image to appear in a  Google image search for each word in an "average" lexicon.  You can see a slide show and brief story at  the Huffington Post. 

Is anyone else reminded of the philosophers from the Grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver's Travels, who attempt to reduce all words to things?

Gulliver reports, "...since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about with them such things as were necessary to express the particular benefits they were to discourse on....if a man's business be very great and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him.

"I have often beheld two of these sages, almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and  hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help one another resume their burdens, and take their leave."

In other words, Jonathan Swift invented the smart phone. 

DSNA course at 2013 LSA Summer Institute

Next year, DSNA will again offer a course as part of the Linguistic Society's Summer Institute, to be held at the University of Michigan. DSNA president Orin Hargraves will be teaching a class on Natural Language Processing. Planning for the Institute is in the early stages, but you can visit the Summer Institute website, and in the meantime, savor the course description:

Determining what words mean is the core skill and practice of lexicography. Determining what words mean is also a central challenge in natural language processing (NLP), where it is usually classed under the exercise of word sense disambiguation (WSD). Until the late 2oth century, lexicography was dominated by scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, literature, and other humanistic disciplines, and the writing of dictionaries was based strongly on intuition, and only secondarily on induction from the study of examples of usage. Linguistics, in this same period, establish itself as a discipline with strong scientific credentials. With the development of corpora and other computational tools for processing text, dictionary makers recognized first the value, and soon the indispensability, of using evidence-based data to develop dictionary definitions, and this brought them increasingly into contact with computational linguists. The developers of computational linguistic tools and resources eventually turned their attention back to the dictionary and found that it was a document that could be exploited for use in the newly emerging fields of linguistic inquiry that computation made possible: NLP, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and machine translation. This course will explore the computational tools that lexicographers use today to write dictionaries, and the ways in which computational linguists use dictionaries in their pursuits. The aim is to give students an appreciation of the unexploited opportunities that dictionary databases offer to NLP, and of the challenges that stand in the way of their exploitation. Students will have an opportunity to explore the ways in which dictionaries may aid or hinder automatic WSD, and they will be encouraged to develop their own models for the use of dictionary databases in NLP.

 

Talking dictionaries for endangered languages

Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken in the world, half could be gone by 2100. Two linguists are using digital recording technology and the Internet to try to preserve these languages in what they call "talking dictionaries." The dictionaries so far contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages, with over 24,000 audio recordings of native speakers pronouncing words and sentences.

The work of K. David Harrison (Swarthmore College)  and Gregory Anderson (Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) includes preservation of languages, like Koro, that have never been recorded before. Koro is a language spoken by only a few hundred people in northeastern India.

Here's a link to an interview with David Harrison on National Public Radio's "Science Friday," and here's an article on Science Codex. The picture (taken from the Wall Street Journal website) shows Harrison with John Agid (left), who is one of only 600 speakers of Matukar Panau, a language of Papua New Guinea.   

Speaking American

The Visual Thesaurus has published an enthusiastic reflection on the late Richard Bailey's book Speaking American. Richard Bailey was a fellow of the Dictionary Society and a former editor of the society's journal Dictionaries. Language columnist Mark Peters writes that Speaking American is "one of those books I wish I could make every prescriptivist grouch in the world read." He also praises "the inspiring scope" of Bailey's project, and "the power of his prose." Speaking American was published by Oxford UP in December 2011.

From Elvish to Klingon

Having puffed my own piece on Samuel Johnson earlier this week, it's only fair to take note of a book that arrived in today's mail: From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages by DSNA vice president Michael Adams. There's more about the book on the Oxford UP website.

Justice Department Seeks Ebonics Experts

This story is subheaded "Bizarre" on The Smoking Gun website. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, according to federal records...

In contract documents, ... Ebonics is listed among 114 languages for which prospective contractors must be able to provide linguists. The languages are divided between “common languages” and “exotic languages.” Ebonics is listed as a “common language” spoken solely in the United States.

You can read the whole story here.

CFP: Computational Linguistics Applications 2011

The 2011 Computational Linguistics-Applications Conference (CLA'11) will take place 17-19 October at the Warszawianka Hotel Wellness & Spa in Jachranka (near Warsaw, Poland). The Computational Linguistics Applications Conference was established to create a dialog between researchers and practitioners involved in Computational Linguistics and related areas of Information Technology. For details on submitting paper proposals along with other conference information, visit the conference website. The deadline for paper proposals is 20 June 2011.

LSA Linguistic Institute applications & DSNA fellowship opportunity

Applications for fellowships for the Linguistic Society of America's 2011 Linguistic Institute, to be held from July 7 through August 2 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, are available online.  The application deadline is February 4. 
 
More information about the Institute is available at https://lsadc.org/info/inst-2011.cfm.  Fellowship applicants must be student members of the LSA.  Nonmembers may join the LSA at https://lsadc.org/secure/login/login-settings1.cfm.  Upon logging in to the LSA website, student members will see a link to “Submit or Resume a Fellowship Application.”
 
DSNA is sponsoring a course entitled "Defining English for Global Consumers: A Course in Practical Lexicography." The instructor is lexicographer and DSNA Vice President Orin Hargraves.

DSNA also funds a Dictionary Society of North America Fellowship, which provides $1,500 tuition for a student at the 2011 LSA Institute who enrolls in the lexicography course. More information the DSNA Fellowship is available here.

 

DSNA Fellowships and Lexicography Course at 2011 LSA Institute

At the 2011 Linguistics Society of America Institute, DSNA will sponsor a course entitled "Defining English for Global Consumers: A Course in Practical Lexicography." The instructor is lexicographer and DSNA Vice President Orin Hargraves.

DSNA also is supporting a new Dictionary Society of North America Fellowship, which provides $1,500 tuition for a student at the 2011 LSA Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder who enrolls in the lexicography course.

For more information on the 2011 LSA Institute, to be held in Boulder, Colorado, please visit the LSA website or the Institute website.