verbal dueling In sociolinguistics, a term which refers to the competitive use of language, within a game-like structure, with rules that are known and used by the participants. It is a genre of verbal play - a ritual dialogue in which each speaker attempts to outdo an opponent by producing an utterance of increased verbal ingenuity. It has been noted, for example, in the ritual exchanges between warriors in classical epic texts as well as in the trading of insults between present-day street gangs.
vocal organs The collective term for all the anatomical features involved in the production of speech sounds, including the lungs, trachea, oesophagus, larynx, pharynx, mouth and nose.
Definitions from: A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth edition, 2008 Image credits: Clipart Etc.
pandialectal A term used primarily in dialectology and sociolinguistics to characterize any linguistic feature, rule, etc., which is applicable to all the dialects of a language.
paronymy A term sometimes used in semantic analysis to refer to the relationship between words derived from the same root. It is especially applied to a word formed from a word in another language with only a slight change: French pont and Latin pons are paronyms and the relationship between them is one of paronymy.
politeness phenomena in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, a term which characterizes linguistics features mediating norms of social behavior, in relation to such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference and distance. Such features include the use of special discourse markers (please), appropriate tones of voice and acceptable forms of address (e.g. the choice of intimate v. distant pronouns or of first v. last names).
Definitions from: A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth edition, 2008 Image credits: Wikipedia - Greek Pi
In December of last year I posted about the upcoming Jeopardy match that will pit a computer named Watson against two of Jeopardy's winningest contestants ever.
Well I just learned that a practice match was held last Thursday, January 13th and here is a clip from said match.
According to an article about the match on POPSCI, "Watson has a certain self-awareness; it knows it won't get every answer right, and has to pass a certain level of confidence before it will answer. Watson's logo will change color to indicate its confidence: The lines that are part of its "avatar" will glow blue if Watson is confident, and orange if it's not."
And here is some information from the POPSCI article about how Watson handles the difficulties of language.
"The vagaries of language mean that the questions can be interpreted in all kinds of different ways, so merely figuring out what the question is trying to ask provides the majority of the struggle for Watson. To that end, the computer actually comes up with thousands of different possible answers, and ranks them by the possibility of correctness. When we watched the quick match, the top three answers were displayed on screen, as well as the confidence percentage, and the second- and third-ranked answers were usually dramatically incorrect. It's not likely that Watson will confuse, say, the author of one children's book with the author of another. It's more likely that Watson will completely misread what the question is even asking, and come up with an answer like "What is children?"
Certain elements of human language are tricky, too--the stuff that seems like it might be the most difficult (like puns and wordplay) are felt out by "trigger" words in the category name, such as "sounds like." But synonyms are often a bigger problem. In the answer "This liquid cushions the brain from injury," Watson has to determine that "liquid" is in this one case interchangeable with "fluid," and that "cushions" is interchangeable with "surrounds." Humans know what the question is asking instinctively, but Watson has to analyze it from every angle."
Watson ended up winning the practice match with $4,400. Ken Jennings placed second with $3,400 and Brad Rutter took third with $1,200.
According to the article linked to above, an IBM computing system named "Watson" will take on two of Jeopardy's most successful contestants ever in a two day match that will be aired in mid-February next year.
The object of the matches is "to see if a machine can compete in a contest that will require it to interpret real-language questions (or, in "Jeopardy!" parlance, answers), research them and answer quicker than the flesh-and-blood champs."
While I do see how the modelling of human language offered by computational linguists has numerous potential benefits, I'm not sure how I feel about the potential of a large-scale decline in person-to-person communication.
The March 2010 issue of Scientific American included an article about a Harvard University study that looked at how children select friends when given a racially and linguistically diverse set of candidates.
The study found that when a group of white five-year-olds were shown pictures and voice recordings of potential friends they "preferred a black child speaking with a native accent over a white child who spoke English with a foreign accent."
While developmental psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler from Harvard explains that "preference for our own race might have developed later, after the more ancient preference for our own accent" the findings from the study are still presented as somewhat of a surprise.
I am not surprised one bit. After all, the key to any successful relationship is communication.
