Nick Montfort's poetics: "Writing very small-scale computational poems allows me to learn more about computing and its intersection with language and poetry. Not computing in the abstract, but computing as embodied in particular platforms, which are intentionally designed and have platform imaginaries and communities of use and practice surrounding them."
"a speculative research project exploring the use of machine learning for the evolution of language. Large language models (LLM's) are fantastic at capturing our language as it currently is - but language is constantly evolving and adapting. Can machine learning help us create something truly new and unbounded by its training data?"
"Working with or against writing systems and what other poets and artists have done with them, we learn something vital about language as it relates to identity that isn’t taught in critical ethnic studies classes or by community elders or culture workers. Or in an MFA poetry workshop, for that matter. And what poets know about language and identity that people whose institutional job or mission it is to know about language and identity do not know is in the poet’s work, in the poems. "
"a collection of full article texts extracted from historical U.S. newspaper images [that] includes nearly 20 million scans from the public domain"
'None of this is predicated on “trying not to misgender someone” or even “trying not to mess up pronouns accidentally and get yelled at.” Linguistic care work, like any care work truly based in principles of a loving community, cannot run on shame-based fuel. Avoiding shame and harm are only the barest, most basic bar to clear—they do not constitute showing affection. Failing to abuse someone isn’t the same as loving them.'
if you think horses and ponies are the same thing, and are content for children to remain ignorant of this fact, you live in a world devoid of wonder and joy
incredibly insightful review. "Their exact words, not just their paraphraseable meaning but their precise choices of phrasing, become full of comprehensible information about character, and this gives the characters themselves an unusual reality and presence. As in all good poetry, it is the language itself, and not just the plot and worldbuilding, that makes us care."
wonderful list of resources relating to early forms of exquisite corpse
generating from a markov model by hand
"a website that produces event scores for performance. The material objects, locations and activities within each score are based on the performance archives of Nathan Walker between 2009-2014 and work towards shuffling and redistributing the archival record to create an anarchive."
rhetoric and conic sections. this is amazing
"BLABRECS is a rules modification for the wordgame SCRABBLE that swaps out the dictionary of real-if-obscure English words for a capricious artificial intelligence. In BLABRECS, real English words aren't allowed! Instead, you have to play nonsense words that sound like English to the AI. These nonsense words are called – you guessed it – BLABRECS."
"Vosk is an offline open source speech recognition toolkit. [...] Vosk models are small (50 Mb) but provide continuous large vocabulary transcription, zero-latency response with streaming API, reconfigurable vocabulary and speaker identification." Bindings for various languages, "scales from small devices like Raspberry Pi or Android smartphone to big clusters."
"TextOCR provides ~1M high quality word annotations on TextVQA images allowing application of end-to-end reasoning on downstream tasks such as visual question answering or image captioning."
could be fun to play with. "With the help of state-of-the-art deep learning models, Layout Parser enables extracting complicated document structures using only several lines of code. This method is also more robust and generalizable as no sophisticated rules are involved in this process."
"a noisy but fascinating collection of documents which can be studied through the lens of natural language processing, information retrieval, and linguistics"
includes pre-trained models for a bunch of interesting tasks: speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech enhancement, speech processing (including multi-microphone processing)
"Hate speech can come in many forms, including memes that combine text and images. This kind of multimodal content can be particularly challenging for AI to detect because it requires a holistic understanding of the meme." that is not the reason that hate speech is difficult to detect, and it's actually harmful that you think it's the reason, sorry
everest's bibliography on text-to-speech and vocal cloning
"complete sets of teaching materials for an undergraduate-level introduction to semantics"
"a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed" (close IPA transcriptions)
bglkjawbflablfhbawefjh
"[T]o avoid the censorship, people have converted parts of the interview into Morse code, filled it up with emojis, or translated it into fictional languages like Sindarin from The Lord of the Rings or Klingon from Star Trek. In one particularly creative example, someone inserted it into the iconic opening crawl of Star Wars."
"Even the fancier controllers of Valve’s Index kits don’t let you separate your fingers to produce the Ws or Vs necessary for some words. [...] It’s a lovely avenue of human connection, but I can also imagine linguists frothing over VR sign language. There’s a great example in Syrmor’s video where a currently learning interpreter called Quentin explains that because the W restriction means they can’t use the normal word for ‘world’, they instead mimic the appearance of a portal opening up in VR. They’ve also got different ways of signing words depending on your gear, which is both fascinating and mildly concerning." that must feel weird
"an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. Moreover, the alphabet of wenyan contains only traditional Chinese characters and 「」 quotes, so it is guaranteed to be readable by ancient Chinese people." (from one of Golan Levin's students)
"a large-scale dataset of misspellings and grammatical errors along with their corrections harvested from GitHub. It contains more than 350k edits and 65M characters in more than 15 languages, making it the largest dataset of misspellings to date."
this looks promising
"a challenge set for evaluating what language models (LMs) know about major grammatical phenomena in English" it warms my heart to see an ngram baseline in there, haha
"I run datasets of iconic feminist texts through a simple textRNN, generating new feminists texts in the legendary words of bell hooks, Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde. Some are funny. Some are poetic. Some make no sense at all and some are way too real. Information about the model and settings can be found under each post."
very cool online text classifier generator (just upload your data and then you can pip install your model!)
another tutorial from emnlp-19
overview + materials for emnlp-19 workshop
"Two neural nets learn to communicate through their own emergent visual language."
"Universal Dependencies (UD) is a framework for consistent annotation of grammar (parts of speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies) across different human languages. UD is an open community effort with over 200 contributors producing more than 100 treebanks in over 70 languages."
"Artists aim differently than sharpshooters. They are not typically trying to take something out, but to draw something out. The mark Holzer hits in this case is the mark in the most cave-drawing sense: the effort to leave (or find) a trace of something that is not an opinion, but a register of some kind, certifying a lived experience. There may be no such thing as a permanent record, but the fact that the Washington Post contributor found Holzer’s work dangerous is a sign in and of itself that it has achieved one of its goals: it has carved a deep enough mark to leave a strong impression (for that writer, a menacing one). That’s the most any language or other kind of mark-making can hope to accomplish."
wiktionary word frequency lists
really remarkable speculation/scholarship on rhythmic patterns in music and language
"The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature."
well this looks fascinating. “How to do things with nonwords: communication, expression, and meaning” “Musical gestures in the typology of linguistic inferences” “Iconic modulation in spoken language: iconicity, intensification, or both?” etc
"Yulia Tsvetkov's research group at Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Our work focuses on natural language processing, particularly cross-lingual approaches, low-resource settings, and social good."
"...the fiction that speech casts visible shadows. [...] converts speech into whimsically animated letters and shapes that appear to float upwards from the shadow of the speaker's head. Visitors can also manipulate these forms directly, using the shadow of their own body. When a phoneme is recognized by the software with sufficient confidence, it is spelled out on the installation's display."
"In this interactive installation participants enter the first word that comes to their mind in one of two input terminals in any language. These words are then the seed of a generative process that develops a poem, bifurcating and mutating, merging languages, poetic styles, sense and nonsense. Poems overlap and degrade over time, eventually fading away. Phonetics are remapped to a new alphabet of sound referencing the body and incidental noises, creating a unique expression for each word and making literal the arbitrariness of the language. This installation was projected on a massive scale covering the walls and ceiling and filling the hall of the old imperial castle in Poznan, Poland. This video shows a demonstration of the generated poetry."
dan jurafsky intro lecture