At the beginning of May I presented a talk at an event called “AVL Tech Connect,” which is a monthly occurrence of the AVL Digital Nomads group (a wonderful community that I’ve joined here in Asheville, NC). The presentation was well-received, and I thought I’d share it with the wider internet. Linguists bring unique qualifications…
According to a recent study in AI and crime science, humans are not all that good at detecting speech deepfakes. Read the sciencedaily.com summary here, and the full paper here. A few brief comments: First off, if you’re not familiar with the concept of a deepfake, now would be a good time to learn. …
Think large language models know it all? Then I’d like to introduce Mike Dillinger, an acquaintance of mine in the tech space. Mike is a Knowledge Graph Architect. Until recently, he worked as Technical Lead for knowledge graph (KG) initiatives at LinkedIn; he’s a wiz in the world of taxonomies, ontologies, and KGs. And he’s…
So okay, this interview is actually 6 years old. But Career Linguist has just posted a new version of the video, with fancy editing… and since the original came out before the birth of Linguamonium and was never shared here, I’d like to share it now: My interview with Dr. Anna Marie Trester!
Okay. I didn’t want to write a post on ChatGPT, because its public release has been like shrapnel through the meat of the internet – but at the end of the day this IS a language blog, and I would be remiss for not doing due diligence. If you’ve been under a rock for the…
After much delay (eek! just realized it’s been a year!), I have another interview with a career linguist for your reading pleasure. [See the first interview here.] Even though I still get the “I’ve never met a real-live linguist” reaction when telling folks what I do, these days there are indeed people working full-time, earning…
I’d like to discuss a theory in cognitive linguistics which is very near to my heart[1]: frame semantics. I’ll also present FrameNet, a database built using frame semantic theory, which has been and continues to be an excellent resource in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Why is frame semantics…
Digital voice agents like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are all the rage these days. But when we talk to our smart devices, are they actually “understanding” our speech in the same way that another human understands it? Take the command, “Find flights from Chicago to New York on February 21.” We can easily comprehend…
I’m a Douglas Hofstadter fan. I read his book I Am a Strange Loop years ago, and it remains one of my three favorite non-fiction books, period. I highly recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the nature of consciousness. The cognitive scientist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid…
