mostly research stuff
okay, what’s that word for people who are wicked into language? entomologist? yeah, whatever, wanted to introduce an uber-nerdy tool for linguists that has received some rave reviews in the past but for some reasons remains relegated to the world of not-a-yahoo-cool-site short lists…it’s the linguist’s search engine, a project led by philip resnick, a prof. at umd in the linguistics department (btw, if you look at the linguistics home page, you’ll see all sorts of wicked smart looking academic lab photos that are regularly used to substantiate grant funding requests…really they just spend that money on beer and candy)…
first off, you can register for use at the engine - and you’ll need to register if you want to store or save collections that you put together - but you can also just log in with username ‘guest’ and password ‘guest‘ and screw around…what’s it about? from the guide, “a linguist-friendly tool that makes it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure. Its aim is to help linguists of all stripes in conducting more thoroughly empirical exploration of evidence, with particular attention to variability and the role of context.”
…if you’re like, “what the shit? what the hell does that mean?” then obviously you studied english, art, dance or were in some way just another liberal arts major disgorged upon the marketplace when you left the world of 200s.f.-3-roommate-crab-infested digs (no w/d btw, and only tiny fridges)…
there are a slew of features and functions developed for credibility and use by, for and with linguistics experts - but for the random site visitor, something that might make sense is using the default login view to analyze a typical sentence - try putting in something (song lyric, like, “i’m thinking about my doorbell, when you gonna ring it, when you gonna ring it”) then “parse” and as you mouse over the elements within the tree, you’ll see the construct of the phrase - and those things should be familiar to you (subject, verb et al)…to get a look at the very interesting ‘query by example‘ functions incluing element generation that you might screw around with (like phrases in context that inherit items you describe as required to create new phrases, etc), take a look at the sample and walk through provided by the team within the user guide - or don’t. it’s your world baby.
honestly, i suspect that a bunch of you will go to this page and be like, “dude, will this give me a synonym or translate for me like elGoog?” - but it is not about that, so seriously, consider how much incredible time and thought went into this project, really look it over, and you’ll understand why people either hop up and down on the arms of sofas when they see it, or wind up like resnick’s dog, bored out of their fucking skulls…
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...
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