Language Log

Yesterday and today, I'm at Washington University in St. Louis at a meeting on open infrastructure for studies of the U.S. Supreme Court, organized by Andrew Martin at the Center for Empirical Research in the Law.  (That sentence sets some kind of local record for prepositional phrase density, but a couple of quick attempts to fix it made things worse.  Just to start with, you've got CERL, which has two, and WUSL, which adds one more…)

This morning, I appealed the somebody-vs.-someone story to the Supreme Court of the United States. The decision came quickly — details are below.

A few weeks ago, we featured Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty, authors (according to Google Scholar) of The Linguistics of Laughter:

Now, thanks to research by Steven Landsburg and Aaron Mandel, we're proud to introduce you to the prolific writer "Ass Meat Research Group", who is listed at amazon.com as the author of 88 books:

The second talk in a workshop on "Natural Algorithms", to be held at Princeton on Nov. 2-3, is Jorge Cortés, "Distributed wombling by robotic sensor networks". But you don't need to be able to attend the workshop in order to learn about this fascinating topic, since the author has recently published a version of the same material. The abstract:

This paper proposes a distributed coordination algorithm for robotic sensor networks to detect boundaries that separate areas of abrupt change of spatial phenomena. We consider an aggregate objective function, termed wombliness, that measures the change of the spatial field along the closed polygonal curve defined by the location of the sensors in the environment. We encode the network task as the optimization of the wombliness and characterize the smoothness properties of the objective function. In general, the complexity of the spatial phenomena makes the gradient flow cause self-intersections in the polygonal curve described by the network. Therefore, we design a distributed coordination algorithm that allows for network splitting and merging while guaranteeing the monotonic evolution of wombliness.

Weasel-speak, as featured in today's Tank McNamara:

There's clearly money in it — and quite a bit of training material out there.

Some people are hard to persuade. In response to my post "'At the end of the day' not management-speak", Peter Taylor commented:

I argue that the first question to ask is whether hearing someone use the phrase "At the end of the day" conveys information on whether they are likely to be a manager…

Well, a definitive determination of the information gain involved, aside from its limited general interest, would require more resources than I can bring to bear over my morning coffee. But we can make a plausible guess, and the answer turns out to be that the "information gain" is probably pretty small, and is just about as likely to point away from the conclusion that the speaker or writer is a manager as towards it.

Following on the critiques of the faulty metadata in Google Books that I offered here and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Jacso of the University of Hawaii writes in the Library Journal that Google Scholar is laced with millions of metadata errors of its own. These include wildly inflated publication and citation counts (which Jacso compares to Bernie Madoff's profit reports), numerous missing author names, and phantom authors assigned by the parser that Google elected to use to extract metadata, rather than using the metadata offered them by scholarly publishers and indexing/abstracting services:

In its stupor, the parser fancies as author names (parts of) section titles, article titles, journal names, company names, and addresses, such as Methods (42,700 records), Evaluation (43,900), Population (23,300), Contents (25,200), Technique(s) (30,000), Results (17,900), Background (10,500), or—in a whopping number of records— Limited (234,000) and Ltd (452,000). 

What makes this a serious problem is that many people regard the Google Scholar metadata as a reliable index of scholarly influence and reputation, particularly now that there are tools like the Google Scholar Citation Count gadget by Jan Feyereisl and the Publish or Perish software produced by Tarma Software, both of which take Google Scholar's metadata at face value. True, the data provided by traditional abstracting and indexing services are far from perfect, but their errors are dwarfed by those of Google Scholar, Jacso says.

Of course you could argue that Google's responsibilities with Google Scholar aren't quite analogous to those with Google Book, where the settlement has to pass federal scrutiny and where Google has obligations to the research libraries that provided the scans. Still, you have to feel sorry for any academic whose tenure or promotion case rests in part on the accuracy of one of Google's algorithms.

Leena Rao at TechCrunch points out a case where semantic search turned into anti-semitic search.

Although I share Geoff Nunberg's disappointment in some aspects of Google's metadata for books,  I've noticed a significant — though apparently unheralded — recent improvement.  So I decided to check this out by following up Bill Poser's post yesterday about insect species, which I thought was likely to turn up an example of the right sort. And in fact, the third hit in a search for {hemipteran} is a relevant one: Irene McCulloch, "A comparison of the life cycle of Crithidia with that of Trypanosoma in the invertebrate host", University of California Publications in Zoology, 19(4) 135-190, October 4, 1919.

This paper appears in a volume that is part of a serial publication. And until recently, Google Books  routinely gave all such publications the date of the first in the series, even if the result was a decade or a century out of whack.

Mark has already extensively blogged the Google Books Settlement Conference at Berkeley yesterday, where he and I both spoke on the panel on "quality" — which is to say, how well is Google Books doing this and what if anything will hold their feet to the fire? This is almost certainly the Last Library, after all. There's no Moore's Law for capture, and nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in charge of the collection a hundred years from now — Google? UNESCO? Wal-Mart? — these are the files that scholars are going to be using then. All of which lends a particular urgency to the concerns about whether Google is doing this right.

My presentation focussed on GB's metadata — a feature absolutely necessary to doing most serious scholarly work with the corpus. It's well and good to use the corpus just for finding information on a topic — entering some key words and barrelling in sideways. (That's what "googling" means, isn't it?) But for scholars looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass, say, it doesn't do a lot of good just to enter "I contain multitudes" in the search box and hope for the best. Ditto for someone who wants to look at early-19th century French editions of Le Contrat Social, or to linguists, historians or literary scholars trying to trace the development of words or constructions: Can we observe the way happiness replaced felicity in the seventeenth century, as Keith Thomas suggests? When did "the United States are" start to lose ground to "the United States is"? How did the use of propaganda rise and fall by decade over the course of the twentieth century? And so on for all the questions that have made Google Books such an exciting prospect for all of us wordinistas and wordastri. But to answer those questions you need good metadata. And Google's are a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

The ideal David Bowie song, according to (Nick Troop's interpretation of) the output of Jamie Pennebaker's LIWC program, correlated with sales figures across Bowie's oeuvre:

Chris Waigl, keeper of the Eggcorn Database, brings to our attention a paper that was presented at CALC-09 (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, held in conjunction with NAACL HLT in Boulder, Colorado, on June 4, 2009). As part of a session on "Metaphors and Eggcorns," Sravana Reddy (University of Chicago Dept. of Computer Science) delivered a paper entitled "Understanding Eggcorns." Here's the abstract:

An eggcorn is a type of linguistic error where a word is substituted with one that is semantically plausible – that is, the substitution is a semantic reanalysis of what may be a rare, archaic, or otherwise opaque term. We build a system that, given the original word and its eggcorn form, finds a semantic path between the two. Based on these paths, we derive a typology that reflects the different classes of semantic reinterpretation underlying eggcorns.

You can read the PDF of Reddy's paper here. Yet another advance in the recognition of eggcornology as a legitimate linguistic subdiscipline.

On the basis of recent research in social psychology, I calculate that there is a 53% probability that Geoff Pullum is male. That estimate is based the percentage of the and a/an in a recent Language Log post, "Stupid canine lexical acquisition claims", 8/12/2009.

But we shouldn't get too excited about our success in correctly sexing Geoff: the same process, applied to Sarah Palin's recent "Death Panel" facebook post ("Statement on the Current Health Care Debate", 8/7/2009),  estimates her probability of being male at 56%.