More snow flocks
I have updated the Snow flocks to have a second variation: flurries.
Wednesday's post has some technical details. Here are some more.
Welcome!
I intend to use this blog as a place to discuss my work (or fun) in progress.
I will sometimes digress into observations about language as well —
I am a recidivist linguist after all.
Snow Flocks
Some mindless entertainment for today: Snow flocks
Just chill.
However if you do want to use your mind, the details follow.
Frequency effects in large word embeddings
Continuing my explorations of frequency effects in word embeddings, I have a another short series in which I provide some summary tests for the frequency effects, and then show those tests in action, especially on large pre-trained word embeddings: Google News, GLoVe, and FastText.
There are still lots of questions to explore. Next up: I intend to address the question of whether these frequency effects make a difference? In other words, would reducing the effects improve the quality of the embeddings?
Quotatives in the Land of Oz and beyond
Quotatives in the Land of Oz and beyond
or
"Oh, yes;" said the girl, ... "No," he said, ...
The Language of Oz
The Language of Oz
Last time I looked at the language of colors, and of course it's hard to think about colors without thinking about rainbows, and it's hard to think about rainbows without thinking abou the song "Over the Rainbow" and it's hard to think about the song without thinking about the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz.
However, even though the movie is a classic, I've never read the books on which it is based. It turns out that L. Frank Baum wrote 14(!) books in the Oz series, plus a bunch of other things connected to the Land of Oz. Not surprisingly, the MGM movie is a bit different from the books — example, Dorothy has silver shoes, not ruby slippers.
Just for fun, I've created a page that lets you explore the language of the Oz books for yourself. (You can open it separately, if you want.) While I won't claim to be a wizard, I hope you will find it wonderful.
P.S.
While Judy Garland sang
the original version of
"Over the Rainbow" (she was only 16!), I think
this version by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
is even better — one of the relatively few cases where a
later interpretation is better than the "classic" one.
Color me intrigued
Color me intrigued
After seeing a whole range of fireworks all across the area north and east of Seattle on the Fourth of July, all from the deck of the place where we're staying, I was inspired to look up some color terms. I was surprised and intrigued by the results.
Frequency effects in word embeddings
I've just posted a series of web pages and accompanying Jupyter notebooks about frequency effects in word embeddings. The short story is that frequency effects are pervasive in word embeddings and furthermore they differ from one embedding method to another.
Watch your balance!
Watch your balance!
For the past few years I've been helping with a project which is a social history of early women artisan photographers. In looking for examples in newspapers or on eBay, using phrases like "woman photographer", "female photographer", and "lady photographer" can be very useful. Being the recidivist linguist that I am, I decided to look for those phrases in a standard balanced corpus of historical English, namely the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Imagine my surprise when I found only a handful of results!
Textoems
Raining on your parade?
Raining on your parade?
Do you ever feel like life is raining on your parade? I mean, how often do you have big plans for Saturday only to have it rain? Having recently moved to Seattle, with its reputation for rain, I decided to see how much parade-raining life brought to Seattle last year.