Tag Archives: language

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Software and sentiments – language as battlefield

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I consider myself pretty fortunate in that I don’t have to moderate the comments here at Futurismic with a heavy hand[1], but that’s down to matters of scale; there just aren’t enough active commenters here to allow severe flamewars to start, but moderating the discussion on a site like BoingBoing is a different matter entirely, and usually requires a layer of direct human interaction after thecommon-or-garden \/1/\9|2/\ spambots have been weeded out.

Those days may be nearing an end, however; New Scientist reports on a new breed of software agent that is programmed to analyse the tone and sentiment of written communication on the web:

The early adopters of these tools are the owners of big brand names in a world where company reputations are affected by customer blogs as much as advertising campaigns. A small but growing group of firms is developing tools that can trawl blogs and online comments, gauging the emotional responses brought about by the company or its products.

[…]

The abusive “flame wars” that plague online discussions are encouraged by the way human psychology plays out over the web, as we’ve explained before. Moderating such discussions can be a time-consuming job, needing much judgment to spot when a heated exchange crosses over into abuse.

Sentiment-aware software can help here too. One example is Adaptive Semantics’ JuLiA – a software agent based on a learning algorithm that has been trained to recognise abusive comments. “She” can take down or quarantine comments that cross a predetermined abuse threshold […]

Work is underway to expand JuLiA’s comprehension abilities – for example, to decide whether text is intelligent, sarcastic, or political in tone.

That’s all well and good, and it’ll probably work for a while – but much like anything else, it’ll be seen as a challenge to exactly the sort of people it’s designed to filter, and we’ll have another software arms race on our hands – albeit one initially played for much lower stakes than the virus/anti-virus game.

But look here a moment:

Another firm, Lexalytics, uses sentiment analysis to influence what people say before it is too late. It can identify which “good news” messages from company executives have the greatest effect on stock price. These results can then be used to advise certain people to speak out more, or less, often, or to gauge the likely effectiveness of a planned release.

Now there’s a double-edged sword; if you can use that analysis to protect and strengthen a stock price, someone can surely use it for exactly the opposite. And even beyond the battlefields of the trading floors and corporate boardrooms, there are plenty of folk who could find a use for software that could advise them on how to make their communications less offensive or incendiary… or more so, if the situation demanded it.

We live in the communication age, so I guess it’s inevitable that communication should become another new frontier for warfare… but look at the bright side: slam poetry contests are going to become a lot more interesting for spectators and participants alike. 😉

[ 1 – That’s not a challenge or a complaint, OK? Thanks. 🙂 ]

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Wolfram Alpha: Answering the questions that matter…

whyPolymath Stephen Wolfram (famed for AOT Mathematica and his book entitled A New Kind of Science) has been developing a knowledge engine that uses a natural language interface. It’s a bit like Google except:

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as a civilization collectively know.

It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

So basically you type in a question in normal language and it should provide an answer, rather than links to webpages that might contain the answer.

Anyway Wolfram Alpha will be launching in May.

[via Charles Stross, ComputerWorld, Physorg etc][image from e-magic on flickr]

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Sarah Palin’s accent

Look, her accent doesn’t bother me.  (It’s the last thing about her that bothers me.) My family includes Minnesotans, so I kind of like her accent. But I’m not the only person who’s been wondering where it comes from. Slate.com called upon a regional-speech specialist, an Alaskan-native scholar, and Frances McDormand’s dialect coach to venture some guesses. Sounds like Minnesota after all:

[Some] have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one’s peers, not one’s parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin’s speech, in particular the sound of her “O” vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.) However, even in the area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin’s frequent dropping of the final G in -ing words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley speech.

As with Donald Rumsfeld, some of Palin’s statements can be rendered as poetry.

[Panel: Diesel Sweeties]

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Dictionary to slaughter cool archaic words

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TimesOnline (UK) is trying to save them:

It may appear agrestic to ask, but The Times is calling on its readers to come to the rescue of words that risk fading into caliginosity.

Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.

[Story tip and panel: Dinosaur Comics]

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Future talk: how will we speak in the future?

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talkingAn interesting look at the changes in language over time – and a science-fictional look at what languages of the future might be like in 1000 years time:

… some factors do show long-term directional influences.  An obvious one is ease of use: people won’t bother saying “omnibus” when “bus” will do, or “environment” when their friends are getting away with “emviromment”.

…

Children forming their initial mental model of how English works don’t want to believe it’s a mess of random idioms; any regularities they notice (like “past tenses end in -ED”) are extended by analogy as far as their peers will let them (“bended”).  All these consistent “trends” in language change make prediction more feasible, or at any rate, less obviously hopeless.

A slightly different comment on language-change is provided by Erin McKean in the Boston Globe, pointing out that there is nothing wrong with changing the English language if you can get your point across clearly (I tend to be pedantic about word-use – a tendency I’m trying to remove):

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I’m vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I’ve ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean “cool.” By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms.

[both links via Boing Boing][image from katiebate on flickr]