The Lair

Old aviation parlance, apparently. Anyone who read Biggles books should have known that already.

I spent days trying to figure out a structure and plan of attack for this problem I’ve been having recently. How does one automatically (by which I mean, with a computer program) determine the intent of a phrase (as opposed to a single word)? A single word is easy. Or at least, less difficult than it used to be. Phrases are still voodoo territory. Hell, even distinguishing a phrase amongst the adverbs and amibiguity in a sentence can be a non-trivial problem.

Plan of attack, ok… even if most of the things I tried didn’t work (leading to considerable frustration), it’s still decent research. A structure and reasons why it all collapsed like an incompetent civil engineer’s bridges? Nope, I was lacking a clue.

So my supervisor, anxious to hear what I had been busy discovering (I forgot to mention Ach, Grapevine and all the other distractions) scheduled a meeting for this afternoon. I had lots and lots of pieces of paper but no structure. I spent a fair bit of time this morning trying to impose some structure on the unholy mess that are my results and failed. Abjectly. Went to the meeting with pieces and fragments of research sticking out in all directions… rather like someone’s hair after a go by a lunatic hairdresser ODing on caffeine.

Sat in the chair. My supervisor waited expectantly.

And suddenly, I had this epiphany.

World peace, a cure for cancer or a solution to global warming it may not be – but my results suddenly and startlingly slipped into context. Everything made sense, for a fleeting moment in time.

If only this was the first time this happened… but it wasn’t. What becomes clear is that I need to either swipe the chair in my super’s office (because it has magical properties) or that I need to move into my supervisor’s office (because the environment has magical properties) or I need to be put on the spot more often.

Now, next time I need to take a notebook and write all that shit down when I’m spouting it. Apparently, only the blunt force trauma of a supervisor meeting enables the clarity of thought required for this piece of research.

From Claws of Steel over there, Wordy No, I meant : Wordy, ah for heaven’s sake Wordie. That’s right. I only fixed it at the third time of asking.

Which is rather nice, even if they don’t have any photos like Flickr. In my particular line of work, I’m always hunting for more language resources and this might actually help. Right now, it’s all about xWn and its forebears but who knows… a project like this might just be that viable replacement that we’re all looking for. It’s silly really, but linguistics (and I’m just confining myself to English) may be a field with rich resources but the computational branch is very much the red headed stepchild of the lot. Out of the estimated 600,000 words in the English language, a mere 150,000 have been catalogued and classified by Wordnet. And quite a few of those catalogued words are genus/species names of plants and animals. Useful, yes but not exactly the sort of thing that you’d encounter in the mundane workaday sentence.

And this leads me seamlessly to 33 names of things that you never knew had names. I tried chanking (spat out food) on Wordie and three people had listed the word already. Unfortunately, all the linked resources weren’t quite so helpful in figuring out the etymology of the word.

And not about linguistics per se, but lists of all sorts… Including one of my favourites, potato crisp flavours from around the world.

I’ve been astonishingly busy the past week or so – hence the usual fluffy content is going to be replaced by something even less calorific – or more so, depending.

From various quarters, we heard that firefighters at the Buncefield oil depot blaze were woefully prepared to tackle the blaze. Quite apart from commentary on the veracity of this claim, the wannabe linguist in me is immediately drawn to the use of woefully in that phrase. See, the more common usage that I’ve seen is something like woefully inadequate where woefully serves to emphasize the inadequacy. In this particular case, though, the word woefully does something entirely different.

All very uninteresting, unless a major part of the previous year was spent in trying to parse, or make sense of, English language constructs in news stories. Woefully prepared and woefully unprepared. Are they the same thing ? Sorta kinda, but not quite. Now figure that stripping adjectives from a phrase is quite common in some shallow parsing techniques and you’ll see the problem… stripping out woefully in one of those cases is going to produce a really bad result.

In other news, it’s that time of year again. Where mandatory socializing and stilted conversation with people whom you can find very little in common is the rule rather than the exception. I’m speaking, of course, of the dinner parties and pre-Christmas get-togethers that have been heading my way like so many headlights on a motorway. No way to duck them in particular, but oh, the crushing boredom.

The alternative (unfortunate though it may sound) is anesthetizing one’s senses with excessive quantities of alcohol… not the healthiest of exercises, but at least it makes prolonged social contact with a crowd of people a bit more tolerable. Also, I’ve discovered in the last week that Taiwanese drinking games are pretty much like the pub games here. The objective in each case is to pour as much alcohol down your neck as humanly possible. Kudo points for the winner.

Christmas do at the department today and I had the best tasting mince pie to date. And since I’m trying to cram in as many sundry factoids about my existence as possible, let me also say that I’ve “discovered” that the local student supermarket (misleadingly named Costcutter) stocks sauces and various interesting odds and ends that are brought in from China. Of course, these are for the quite large populace of Chinese students, but there’s nothing wrong with someone else trying out a few of the intriguingly named items, is there ? Duck’s feet ? Hmmm. Incidentally, the recipe linked calls for one petal of star anise – the major constituent of Tamiflu.