Linguistic management software

I just discovered Emdros by reading FieldMethods, which wants to be an NLP portal (and does a good job!).

I wish I'd known about Emdros two years ago... I spend so much energy writing software that does what Emdros sets out to do that it makes me jealous.

On the other hand, it's nice to find it now.

Good paper introducing MT

Following another link from fieldmethods.net, I stumbled on Kevin Knight's homepage at ISI (at USC).

I was reminded that my new funding will be on a multi-lab project involving ISI and SSLI at the University of Washington, so I decided to read some of his papers. I am seriously enjoying his paper surveying Machine Translation, partly because of phrases like this one:

[a research system of Knight's] once translated a Japanese sentence as "There is a plan that a baby is happening in her", a pretty reasonable translation, but with a definite Japanese-semantics feel to it. Semantics is not an all-or-nothing proposition in MT any more than in, say, expert systems. [p. 2]

Hee. Thanks, Pat-from-fieldmethods!

the change that literacy creates in the way we think

Here's a note from my brother about this new book from JHU:

(the link contains the first chapter or so of "Information Ages" by Michael Hobart.) Here are ( my brother's comments: )

The ideas presented here are challenging (but wildly speculative) about the nature of how literacy affects what we believe about language.