Earlier this week, I talked about the major themes in how the press has been covering artificial intelligence since 2015. This post puts the recent months in context, looking at whether we are in an AI spring time (tl;dr: we are) and when the AI winter(s) were. A big theme is going to be hype-and-disappointment, so we’ll close on “are we in hyperhype right now?”
Read MoreIf you could read everything on Google News that mentioned artificial intelligence, what would you find? (tl;dr: a lot of stuff on Google and humans)
Read MoreI’ve been training an artificial intelligence system to write poetry and this morning I got interested in what the little parts of syntax and semantics are that preoccupy poets compared to other forms of written language. So I took a heap of poetry and a heap of not-poetry , pulled out the bigrams (two-word phrases) and did some statistics to see what distinguishes poetic writing from non-poetic writing.
Read MoreTyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and cofounder of Idibon, a startup that processes unstructured language data (including emoticons and emojis), says the project could be useful for finding videos made by those who don’t speak the same language as you. But for him, the point of the project seems to be that it’s simply fun.
Read MoreWhat makes someone on Reddit posting about conspiracies sound particularly paranoid? How do corporations detect employees committing fraud? When consumers file complaints against financial institutions, how do they tell their stories? Rationality and causation are themes that unite these three questions.
Read MoreThe human skull has 14 facial bones and 35 muscles wrapping around these bones. That anatomy works together to form everything from grimaces, to grins, to mouths agape. Beyond the face, there are all kinds of cues that you can use to understand someone: voice contours, body language, and eye contact, to name a few.
Read MoreIdibon chief analyst Tyler Schnoebelen describes the capabilities of Idibon's technology, and how putting the human into the loop can increase accuracy in text analytics.
Read MoreThere may not be anyone who knows more about emoticons than Tyler Schnoebelen, a man who literally wrote his Stanford doctorate thesis on the subject. He found, for instance, that older people tend to use emoticons with noses, such as [:-)], while younger people are more likely to drop the proboscis. He discovered that roughly 10% of all tweets contain an emoticon. And he observed that the phrase f*** you rarely appears with an emoticon, because those playful little symbols can trivialize feelings like totally hating someone’s guts.
Read MoreHere are 14 essays, 7 presentations, and reading notes on 57 different papers/books all having to do with emotion and language.
Read More(Download my dissertation here)
To understand human beings is to understand the variety and complexity of emotional experiences they have. Understanding how language is both shaped by and used in creating and coping with these experiences is the focus of this dissertation. It offers three case studies about affective linguistic resources, advancing a theoretical framework (positioning) and a series of quantitative methodologies that grow out of information-theoretic approaches to language.
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