̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - words

'Populism' revealed as 2017 Word of the Year by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

sjr81 — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:02:21 +0000

Choosing a winner required looking at not only the most searched-for words but also spikes – occasions when a word is suddenly looked up many more times than usual on or around a particular date.

As Donald Trump, a polarizing candidate was being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 22, 2017, searches for the word 'inauguration' on the online Cambridge Dictionary spiked. But so did searches for the word 'populism' because, on that same day, Pope Francis warned against a rising tide of populism in a widely reported interview with El Pais newspaper. In mid-March, after another high-profile interview with the pontiff – this time with the German newspaper Die Zeit – searches for populism spiked again.

Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: 'Spikes can reveal what is on our users’ minds and, in what’s been another eventful year, plenty of spikes can be directly connected to news items about politics in the US (nepotism, recuse, bigotry, megalomania) and the UK (shambles, untenable, extradite). ̽��ֱ��much-anticipated Taylor Review of working practices in the UK caused the term 'gig economy' to spike in July, and of course the spectacular solar eclipse is reflected in the spike for eclipse on 21 August.

'What sets populism apart from all these other words is that it represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.'

Populism is described by the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want’. It includes the usage label ‘mainly disapproving’.

Populism has a taint of disapproval because the -ism ending often indicates a philosophy or ideology that is being approached either uncritically (liberalism, conservatism, jingoism) or cynically (tokenism).

Evidence from the Cambridge English Corpus – a 1.5-billion-word database of language – reveals that people tend to use the term populism when they think it’s a political ploy instead of genuine. Both aspects of -ism are evident in the use of populism in 2017: the implied lack of critical thinking on the part of the populace, and the implied cynicism on the part of the leaders who exploit it.

̽��ֱ��word 'populism' has been announced as the Cambridge Dictionary 2017 Word of the Year.

What sets populism apart from all these other words is that it represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.

Wendalyn Nichols

̽��ֱ��White House (official Flickr)

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at Yokota Air Base | November 5, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

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AI crossword-solving application could make machines better at understanding language

sc604 — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 09:38:00 +0000

Researchers have designed a web-based platform which uses artificial neural networks to answer standard crossword clues better than existing commercial products specifically designed for the task. ̽��ֱ��system could help machines understand language more effectively.

In tests against commercial crossword-solving software, the system, designed by researchers from the UK, US and Canada, was more accurate at answering clues that were single words (e.g. ‘culpability’ – guilt), a short combination of words (e.g. ‘devil devotee’ – Satanist), or a longer sentence or phrase (e.g. ‘French poet and key figure in the development of Symbolism’ – Baudelaire). ̽��ֱ��system can also be used a ‘reverse dictionary’ in which the user describes a concept and the system returns possible words to describe that concept.

̽��ֱ��researchers used the definitions contained in six dictionaries, plus Wikipedia, to ‘train’ the system so that it could understand words, phrases and sentences – using the definitions as a bridge between words and sentences. Their results, published in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, suggest that a similar approach may lead to improved output from more general language understanding and dialogue systems and information retrieval engines in general. All of the code and data behind the application has been made freely available for future research.

“Over the past few years, there’s been a mini-revolution in machine learning,” said Felix Hill of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, one of the paper’s authors. “We’re seeing a lot more usage of deep learning, which is especially useful for language perception and speech recognition.”

Deep learning refers to an approach in which artificial neural networks with little or no prior ‘knowledge’ are trained to recreate human abilities using massive amounts of data. For this particular application, the researchers used dictionaries – training the model on hundreds of thousands of definitions of English words, plus Wikipedia.

“Dictionaries contain just about enough examples to make deep learning viable, but we noticed that the models get better and better the more examples you give them,” said Hill. “Our experiments show that definitions contain a valuable signal for helping models to interpret and represent the meaning of phrases and sentences.”

Working with Anna Korhonen from the Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and researchers from the Université de Montréal and New York ̽��ֱ��, Hill used the model as a way of bridging the gap between machines that understand the meanings of individual words and machines that can understand the meanings of phrases and sentences.

“Despite recent progress in AI, problems involving language understanding are particularly difficult, and our work suggests many possible applications of deep neural networks to language technology,” said Hill. “One of the biggest challenges in training computers to understand language is recreating the many rich and diverse information sources available to humans when they learn to speak and read.”

However, there is still a long way to go. For instance, when Hill’s system receives a query, the machine has no idea about the user’s intention or the wider context of why the question is being asked. Humans, on the other hand, can use their background knowledge and signals like body language to figure out the intent behind the query.

Hill describes recent progress in learning-based AI systems in terms of behaviourism and cognitivism: two movements in psychology that effect how one views learning and education. Behaviourism, as the name implies, looks at behaviour without looking at what the brain and neurons are doing, while cognitivism looks at the mental processes that underlie behaviour. Deep learning systems like the one built by Hill and his colleagues reflect a cognitivist approach, but for a system to have something approaching human intelligence, it would have to have a little of both.

“Our system can’t go too far beyond the dictionary data on which it was trained, but the ways in which it can are interesting, and make it a surprisingly robust question and answer system – and quite good at solving crossword puzzles,” said Hill. While it was not built with the purpose of solving crossword puzzles, the researchers found that it actually performed better than commercially-available products that are specifically engineered for the task.

Existing commercial crossword-answering applications function in a similar way to a Google search, with one system able to reference over 1100 dictionaries. While this approach has advantages if you want to look up a definition verbatim, it works less well when you input a question or query that the model has never seen in training. It also makes it incredibly ‘heavy’ in terms of the amount of memory it requires. “Traditional approaches are like lugging many heavy dictionaries around with you, whereas our neural system is incredibly light,” said Hill.

According to the researchers, the results show the effectiveness of definition-based training for developing models that understand phrases and sentences. They are currently looking at ways of enhancing their system, specifically by combining it with more behaviourist-style models of language learning and linguistic interaction.

Reference:
Hill, Felix et al. Learning to Understand Phrases by Embedding the Dictionary. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, [S.l.], v. 4, p. 17-30, feb. 2016. ISSN 2307-387X.

A web-based machine language system solves crossword puzzles far better than commercially-available products, and may help machines better understand language.

Despite recent progress in AI, problems involving language understanding are particularly difficult.

Felix Hill

Beth

Crossword

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Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

amb206 — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:30:00 +0000

For more than a decade Dr Robert Macfarlane has collected endangered words. Not just any words but words for aspects of landscape – its contours, its feel underfoot, its weathers and moods – made fragile by the passing of time and the changing of practices. Lists of these words, organised into themed glossaries, form the backbone of his latest book Landmarks.

In the text that accompanies his word lists, Macfarlane travels from the peat bogs of the Isle of Lewis to the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens in search of hidden lexical treasure. Flying into Stornoway over the brown moorland expanses of Lewis, he overhears a couple joking that they have come to see nothing. Half an hour later, he’s talking to a Lewisian friend who is compiling a glossary of Gaelic peat-language: it encompasses 120 terms.

When Macfarlane wrote an article for the Guardian Review about Landmarks, he added a postscript inviting readers to send him postcards noting their words for landscape. He wasn’t sure whether people still sent postcards. They do. ̽��ֱ��cards reproduced here (with permission from senders) are just a few of the dozens that have found their way into Macfarlane’s pigeon hole at Emmanuel College.

View postcards on Flickr

A ‘dimple’, writes one correspondent, is Derbyshire for a pool in a wood or dell. ‘Geevy’, informs a card from Cornwall, is a mixture of mist and drizzle – “as in it’s a geevy old day”. A Radnorshire word for molehill is ‘unty-tump’. Written on the back of a postcard of the Cairngorms is: “eddish = 2nd crop of hay.” ‘Sprittin’ is “sprouting as in the hawthorn’s sprittin, spring’s on its way.”

John Birkett, who as a boy helped on farms in Cheshire, sent a handwritten list of more than 50 terms, subdivided and graded by x (possibly in use), xx (known to me as a lad) and xxx (known by my father in the 1920s). ‘Puthery’, meaning very humid, is “still used naturally by wife and I”. A cowshed is always a ‘shippon’: the word cowshed was never used as “it was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south”.

Each day brings more post. ̽��ֱ��latest is a letter from Mary West who lives in Westhorpe in Nottinghamshire. She writes to offer Macfarlane a large collection of words and sayings, recorded on index cards. She has been gathering words relating to the countryside for 40 years. “I’ve always collected things and I love words,” she says. “I’ve made around 25 scrap books about the lovely village where I live.”

Though unable to respond personally, Macfarlane would like to thank all those who sent not just words but poems and stories. They include writers and academics, a Jungian analyst, a ‘lollipop man’ and a lady in Lancashire aged 96. Their messages suggest how much their words for landscape mean to them. Recording and archiving their contributions will be a project in its own right.

Macfarlane would like more people to write to him with their word-gifts. Contributors should restrict their offerings to words that describe aspects of the landscapes of Britain and Ireland (names for places but no place-names, please), and could come from any of the many languages, dialects and sub-dialects of these islands, from Gaelic to Welsh, Shetlandic to Jérriais.

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers these words is among the scores of people who have written to Dr Robert Macfarlane in response to his latest book, Landmarks.

A cowshed was always a shippon. Cowshed was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south.

Retired farmer, Cheshire

Ways to get involved and contribute more words

Send postcards to: Dr Robert Macfarlane, Emmanuel College, St Andrews Street, Cambridge CB2 3AP.

Send tweets using #livinglanguage

Leave comments in the section below.

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̽��ֱ��needle and the pen

amb206 — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:46:45 +0000

In August 1992, the writer WG Sebald set off on the walking tour of Suffolk that he later immortalised in ̽��ֱ��Rings of Saturn. His journey took him through innumerable scenes of decline and decay—fading seaside towns, silted-up rivers, abandoned pleasure palaces, whole towns lost beneath the waves—and in the book those scenes prompt a series of meditations on human failure and folly.

Sebald’s melancholy East Anglian odyssey ends in Norwich, where he turns to consider the many silk-weaving workshops that once kept that city lit up until late into the night. Looking at the surviving 18th-century pattern books, lined with ‘marvellous strips of colour, the edges and gaps filled with mysterious figures and symbols’, he finds in them ‘an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty’. These pages , copies of which once travelled the trade-routes of Europe, ‘seem to be leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival’. In concluding his patchwork travelogue with this celebration of a silk sample-book, Sebald makes a connection that has deep roots in human cultures, between the textual and the textile.

Next week, an ambitious interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge will unravel the fascinating interplay between words and fabrics. Run by the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Material Texts, the two-day conference is the latest in a series on ‘the material text in material culture’; last year’s meeting considered the interplay between reading, writing and eating. “After ‘Eating Words’, there was a certain inevitability about “Texts and Textiles’,” says the Centre’s director, Jason Scott-Warren. “You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.”

̽��ֱ��connection between texts and textiles begins in shared etymology; both words find their origins in the Latin verb texere, ‘to weave’. And that analogy between words and fabric continues to proliferate in our own everyday speech. We all know what it means to spin a yarn, or to lose the thread of a story. Every good plot needs a dénouement, an untying or unknotting, and from Ariosto to ̽��ֱ��Archers, narratives have benefited from entrelacement, the interlacing of several strands which can be left hanging at moments of crisis.

̽��ֱ��textile metaphor has been picked up by literary theorists such as Roland Barthes, who in ̽��ֱ��Death of the Author insists that we should not attempt to decipher texts but should instead disentangle them: ‘the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath’.

̽��ֱ��textile arts not only allow us to think about how literature works; they are also involved in the very stuff from which books are fashioned—whether we think of the rags that make paper, the sewing together of pages, or the various materials employed in bookbinding. Textiles (and the women who have made them) are also the subject of many stories, whether we are talking about Homer’s Penelope, Ovid’s Philomela, or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

And of course, the threads also run the other way. Samplers are only one of the many forms of fabric that have carried verbal messages, many of them moralising or improving. ̽��ֱ��recent exhibition of Quilts 1700-2010 at the Victoria and Albert Museum was subtitled ‘Hidden Histories, Untold Stories’. As well as displaying numerous quilts that had textual sources for their visual designs, or that had messages embroidered onto them, the V&A’s show also exposed the printed and handwritten texts that had been cut up to serve as templates or backing in the making of the patchwork. ̽��ֱ��patches on one 19th-century coverlet, celebrating a marriage, were rumoured to have been ‘pieced-in’ with the couple’s love-letters.

Tracy Emin’s infamous tent, ‘Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995’, which bore appliquéd names of her bedfellows from birth, offers a less romantic demonstration of the power of the stitched word. Meanwhile, even wordless textiles have a tantalising relationship with verbal culture, tempting us to ponder the ‘grammar of ornament’ or to decode the language of their decorative schemes. Of all fabrics, those used in clothing are perhaps the most legible. ̽��ֱ��‘newspaper outfits’ used in the Olympics‘ closing ceremony may have been intended to celebrate the freedom of the British press but they also suggest the eloquence of what we wear, whether or not it boasts a designer label.

From artists’ books to knitting blogs, from ancient Greek lyric to the language of modern colorectal surgery, ‘Texts and Textiles’ will explore a huge range of perspectives on its theme, hearing not only from academics but also from practitioners who make their living from the warp and weft of words. ̽��ֱ��keynote speaker is the anthropologist Tim Ingold from the ̽��ֱ�� of Aberdeen, whose work has reflected in fascinating ways on writing, stitching, storytelling and journeying. Doubtless the conference will leave many loose ends, but it promises to be an enthralling tapestry.

Texts and Textiles, a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts, will take place on 11 and 12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge. For further information, contact the organisers, Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) or Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

A conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� will explore the ways in which words and fabrics are stitched together in language and literature – and celebrate the means by which textiles carry hidden narratives in their warp and weft.

You simply can’t get to grips with literature as a material phenomenon without thinking about its relationship with the physical fabrics that surround us.

Jason Scott-Warren

Sara Impey

Quilt by Sara Impey titled Context, made in silk

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