i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google introduced a number of new features today, most notably real-time updates and searching by an uploaded photo. Real-time updates means that Twitter and Facebook statuses will immediately feed to Google search.

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

Sorry... it was a good question, but this is Craig's response:

"Dan, thanks! Can't disclose, though, any measures to detect bad stuff.

Craig" 

 So there was some debate over whether translating back and forth between languages is a fair assessment of a translation system, but I definitely find it entertaining. Translation Party repeatedly translates a phrase between English and Japanese until an equilibrium has been established. For example, "May the force be with you" is eventually transformed into "One of the other five have one or two months and one single-supply one."

As some of you are probably aware, the Google Voice service will automatically transcribe your voicemail using Google's speech recognition technology - it was mentioned in one of Emily's blog posts.

Today's lecture on machine translation and language bias reminded me of this chestnut:

What do you call someone who speaks multiple languages?

Multilingual

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

American

Learning a foreign language from translations can be a good method, but seems like some metaphors and idioms don't translate well (transcript here).

Yes, a very late-semester kind of post... .

Interesting note: Hungarian is related to almost no other European language. The most likely relative might surprise you.

This looks like fun... http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/lec/LEC/Evolution_Experiment.html

Language creation like a big game of "telephone". How could such a quick (not over generations, and translations) evolution affect translations and organization?

I'll see Jess's game show and raise with my bid of The Starlost. Which I thought was pretty damn spiffy when I was a kid.

CNN article: English getting its millionth word [...]

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One million words! Wow. Since English is not my native language, having to catch up with roughly 995.000 more words is not really good news for me. But then, how do you count the words that comprise a language? How do you define "a word"? What is "a word"?

According to the article, linguists state that