Tend not to talk about linguistics that much, despite the degree. And sort-of blow people off when they ask about it, because frankly I already spend more than enough time trying to convince people that no, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about and really, really need to stop acting like they do, and trying to translate complex ideas to a level where they can be understood by those with a non-splitting family tree.
Yes, I am in a wonderful mood today. Good of you to notice.
Slashdot mentions the review of Morphix-NLP I noticed on Field Methods a few days back, but neglected to mention.
I'm mentioning it now.
An Introduction to Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)
RST was originally developed as part of studies of computer-based text generation. A team at Information Sciences Institute (part of University of Southern California) was working on computer-based authoring. In about 1983 part of the team, (Bill Mann, Sandy Thompson and Christian Matthiessen) noted that there was no available theory of discourse structure or function that provided enough detail to guide programming any sort of author.Responding to this lack, RST was developed out of studies of edited or carefully prepared text from a wide variety of sources. It now has a status in linguistics that is independent of its computational uses.
[. . .] RST is intended to describe texts, rather than the processes of creating or reading and understanding them. It posits a range of possibilities structure -- various sorts of "building blocks" which can be observed to occur in texts. These "blocks" are at two levels, the principal one dealing with " nuclearity " and " relations " (often called coherence relations in the linguistic literature.) A second level of structures, called schemas , is not presented here.
I mention this because RST Tool is probably -- haven't checked -- on the Morphix cd:
This manual describes the RST Tool, a graphical interface for marking up the structure of text. While primarily intended to be used for Rhetorical Structure (cf. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST): Mann & Thompson 1988), the tool also allows the mark-up of constituency-style analysis, as in the Generic Structure Potential (GSP - cf. Hasan 1984; Halliday & Hasan 1985).The tool works under Windows, Macintosh, UNIX and LINUX operating systems, and requires the pre-installation of Tcl/Tk, a scripting language engine.
Link to Tcl.tk added to original. Because I felt like it.
Meanwhile, back at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris: Language, one topic under study is The production and recognition of emotions in speech:
The ability to express and recognize emotions or attitudes through the modulation of the intonation of the voice is fundamental to human communication. In particular, it allows to coordinate the social interactions with babies, like in language games (giving feedback, calling for attention).[. . .] Emotions have some mechanical effects on physiology, like heart rate modulation or dryness in the mouth, which in turn have effects on the intonation of the voice. This is why it is possible in principle to predict some emotional information from the prosody of a sentence.
We are investigating how to control the pitch (fundamental frequency) and energy of synthetic speech signal so that a robot can express attitudes or emotions that can be recognized by humans.
God bless Sony. They're wacky.
Moving further east, we reach Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. (Japan branch), where there's folks like Katashi Nagao:
I have been researching the human-computer interaction in which natural language is the principal interaction medium. My current research objective is to integrate natural language with other nonverbal modalities. This so-called multimodal interaction pursues a smooth interaction by combining linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. In my opinion, the research on multimodal interaction can be categorized in two classes. One is agent-orientation that considers computers (or software modules) as social individuals that can converse with humans and perform tasks cooperatively with humans. The other is real-world-orientation that embeds computers into physical circumstances or makes them be always with humans. These computers can be aware of humans' real-world situations, be cognizant of their personal information, recognize their intentions from their speech and actions, and support them automatically.
Seem like nice folk, based on the Prospectus of Sony Computer Science Laboratories:
The Sony Computer Science Laboratories was founded in February 1988 for the sole purpose of conducting research relating to computer science. Our objective is to contribute extensively to social and industrial development through original research that looks ahead to the 21st century and has the potential for achieving breakthroughs in computer development. It is our policy to make public the results of our research. Research currently under way here is focused on distributed operating systems, computer networks, programming languages, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, complex systems and other fundamental aspects of next-generation computers. With work in these field as a starting point, we plan to expand into extensive research in the computer science. Each member of the Sony Computer Science Laboratories sets his or her own research goals within these basic research themes. Results in any format such as research software or technical papers are published under the names of the individual researchers. This is because we believe that research should be carried out by a group under its own initiative and with the freedom of its individual members, and that a laboratory should be a place dedicated to supporting this activity. The results achieved by each member are evaluated through such media as technical papers, research software products, and domestic and international conferences and professional associations. Therefore, in our compensation system, which is completely unrelated to seniority, each members is financially compensated in accordance with his or her achievements.
Any road up, have come to the conclusion that if someone isn't interested in the material here, no one is forcing them to read any of it. Same applies if you're offended by any of it. You can always, you know, fuck off.
Don't let that screen door hit you in the ass on the way out.
On second thought, let it hit you.
of course, if you don't post it, i won't be able to keep up with your edumacation.
and, didn't know that CB textgen begat RST, which in turn uses TCL, something i'm all too familiar with. just call me a tech arch.
keep bouncing.
interested. mommie dearest was an EBT [Everything But the Thesis] PhD candidate at B-Town and a crony of Lakoff, Chomsky et al. She was more interested in things like slang and the difference between spoken and written narrative. i think i'll CTRL-A,C,& V this to her.
no wonder you (1)think more about what things mean than most people and (2)often sound like you could be a relative of mine.