Advanced English Skills

Language Log Bloom filters Today's xkcd: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/bloom_filter_2x.png According to Wikipedia, A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […] This is an all-too-common situation in forensic applications, though the reason has nothing to do with the Bloom filter hash-function method. To take a simple example, suppose that a video recording shows that someone is 6'1", give or take an inch.  If a suspect is is 6"1', they're "possibly in set" — though it's not strong evidence of guilt, since there are lots of people that size. But if they're 5"4', then they're "definitely not in set", at least if the measurements are accurate. In my opinion, a more complicated version of the same thing applies to forensic speaker identification. The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof adds an additional asymmetry in criminal cases. ➖ @EngSkills ➖

ions, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When one word erroneously replaces another, most of the time the target and substituting word are of the same syntactic category. Nouns slip with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on. In other words, we're NOT likely to say something like "When one word erroneously replacement another, …" or "exchanges, anticipation, perseverations, and noncontextual substituted […] obey a syntactic category rule". But errors of this type are fairly common in typing. They seem to be cases where we've started to type the right thing, but as our attention shifts to the following material, our fingers follow a familiar but incorrect path. I suspect that an explanation of this difference would tell us something important about speech production. Some relevant past posts: "A Cupertino of the mind", 5/22/2008 "What the fingers want", 7/30/2015 "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018 "'Evil being protesting'", 6/27/2018 And in 2009, Stan Carey wrote about typing that for than ("A typo more mysterious that most"), and then catalogued many published examples ("Even stealthier than I thought", 5/5/2010). What brought this all to mind was someone who commented on Nikola Jokić's role in Sunday's Denver/Minnesota NBA playoff game by writing: He player 47 minutes tonight. He should have played like 41. Again, this is a normal type of "capture error" in typing, but it would never happen in speech. If I've missed some relevant research — which is likely — please let me know in the comments. ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log Linguistic capture errors Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called  "completion errors": …a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word.  I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending up with COOPERATION, for instance.  And several people have reported on the American Dialect Society mailing list that their intention to type LINGUISTS frequently leads them into LINGUISTICS, which then has to be truncated.  (This discussion on ADS-L followed my typing "original Broadway case", with CASE instead of CAST, and commenting on it.) 26 years earlier, David Rumelhart and Donald Norman used the term "capture errors" for this phenomenon ("Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance", Cognitive Science 1982: This category of error occurs when one intends to type one sequence, but gets "captured" by another that has a similar beginning (Norman, 1981). Examples include: efficiency – > efficient incredibly – > incredible normal – > norman They further cite Donald Norman, "Categorization of action slips", Psychological review (1981), who wrote about "capture errors" of a more general type: Capture slips. A capture error occurs when a familiar habit substitutes itself for the intended action sequence. The basic notion is simple: Pass too near a well-formed habit and it will capture your behavior. This set of errors can be described by concepts from the traditional psychological literature on learning—strong habits are easily provoked. […] [C]apture errors have a certain flavor about them that set them off. Reason (1979) described them in this way: Like the Siren's call, some motor programs possess the power to lure us into unwitting action, particularly when the central processor is occupied with some parallel mental activity. This power to divert action from some intention seems to be derived in part from how often and how recently the motor program is activated. The more frequently (and recently) a particular sequence of movements is set in train and achieves its desired outcome, the more likely it is to occur uninvited as a "slip of action." The classic example of a capture error [is] the example from James of the person who went to his room to change for dinner and found himself in bed. Here are two more examples, one from my collection and one from Reason's: I was using a copying machine, and I was counting the pages. I found myself counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King." (I have been playing cards recently.) I meant to get my car out, but as I passed through the back porch on my way to the garage I stopped to put on my Wellington boots and gardening jacket as if to work in the garden. (Reason, 1979). Rumelhart and Norman exclude these errors from their typing model: "There is no provision in the model for capture errors." And both earlier and later models of typing, as far as I can tell, either ignore these "capture errors" or similarly mention them without serious engagement, probably because they're much rarer than other sorts of typos. But what I care about is something else. No doubt there are also "capture errors" in speech, though I don't think there's been an attempt to distinguish them systematically from other kinds of substitutions. What's interesting — and apparently ignored by psycholinguists — is the striking difference that I noted in "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018: There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995: One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipat[...]

Word of the Day vestige Definition: (noun) A visible trace, evidence, or sign of something that once existed but exists or appears no more. Synonyms: tincture, trace, shadow. Usage: He was so deadly pale—which had not been the case when they went in together—that no vestige of color was to be seen in his face. Discuss ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Word of the Day Word of the Day: galling This word has appeared in 37 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence? ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Idiom of the Day have (something) going for (one) To have something that is favorable, beneficial, or advantageous to one. Watch the video ➖ @EngSkills ➖

futile

Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub knackered (2) severely damaged ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub look after to make sure something or someone has everything they need and is healthy ➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log Google AI Overview has a ways to go …or maybe I should say, "is deeply stupid, so far". At least, that's the verdict from my first encounter with this heralded innovation. I updated a Chromebook, re-installed Linux, and thought (incorrectly) that I might need to add repositories in order to install some non-standard apps like R and Octave and Emacs. (Never mind if that's all opaque to you — AI supposedly knows its way around basic tech stuff…) So I googled "how to install R in linux on a chromebook", and got this: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1.png If I were ignorant enough to try that, the apt command would respond # apt install R base and R base Dash Dev Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base' Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base' E: Unable to locate package R E: Unable to locate package R E: Unable to locate package Dash E: Unable to locate package Dev # That's because the package names in question should be r-base and r-base-dev. Apparently Google AI thinks that names should (sometimes?) be capitalized, and that typographical hyphen (Unicode 0x002D) should sometimes be replaced by a space, and sometimes by the string " Dash ". Which makes sense in some contexts, but absolutely does not work in computer instructions… Anyhow, I figured out for myself that the standard repository list for the Chromebook's Linux installation already includes the packages in question, so I simply needed to ask (in the standard way) for them to be installed. The AI Overview "Learn more" link tells me that http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1A.png "Info quality may vary" indeed. It's probably not an accident that most of the recent news articles on AI Overview are about how to turn it off… Maybe GPT-4 can answer this question in a less ignorant way, even if it can't count? I don't have the time to try this morning. ➖ @EngSkills ➖