Tag: Language
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Aptonymes, palindromes et autres énantiosèmes, curiosités savoureuses de la langue française
Le plus long mot palindrome du français est le verbe ressasser, mais il existe aussi des phrases palindromes. Certaines sont célèbres : « Ce reptile lit Perec » (Georges Perec), « Esope reste ici et se repose » (Maître Capello), « Elu par cette crapule » (Marcel Duchamp), « L’ami naturel ? Le rut animal » (Louise de Vilmorin) « Et si l’arôme des bottes révèle…
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How AI is changing language | Books | The Guardian
One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. “AI is really good at the lower levels. It’s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical.…
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The Adjective Word Order We All Follow Without Realizing It
the rules of adjective order that fluent English speakers follow without quite knowing why. …adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a…
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Tyranny of the Simile: Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise
Most nouns are closer to being generalists, sometimes because they have some reliable pairings because of distinct qualities (e.g., glass is smooth, fragile, transparent) or because of conceptually similar adjectives (e.g., the sun is bright, brilliant, radiant). But like most things, the interesting stuff lies at the extremes. Certain nouns are so tightly coupled with…
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Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds | Whales | The Guardian
“They have very different lives to us – they’re not stuck to the ground all the time, they float in the water, they sleep vertically,” said Beguš. “Yet you realize that there’s a lot that unifies us. They have grandmas, they babysit each other’s calves, they give collaborative births, they’re very loud during a birth…
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40,000-year-old German artifacts may display written language precursor | Reuters
For example, crosses were found only on tools and animal figurines, but not on human figurines. The researchers analyzed more than 200 Stone Age artifacts that bore these signs, dating from about 43,000 to 34,000 years ago, from four cave sites in southwestern Germany associated with a culture called the Aurignacian. The Adorant figurine, for…
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The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking — with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions — into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a…
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How LLMs give semantic meaning to a prompt| ngrok blog
In summary, embeddings are points in n-dimensional space that you can think of as the semantic meaning of the text they represent. During training, each token gets moved within this space to be close to other, similar tokens. The more dimensions, the more complex and nuanced the LLM’s representation of each token can be. —…
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What ’67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity – Atlas Obscura
Language is still new to them, and they find difficulty in expressing themselves. When on their own they burst into rhyme, of no recognizable relevancy, as a cover in unexpected situations, to pass off an awkward meeting, to fill a silence, to hide a deeply felt emotion, or in a gasp of excitement.” This is…