Language Log

It's hard to keep up with the waves of hype and anti-hype in the LLM space these days.

Here's something from a few weeks ago that I missed — Xiaoxuan Wang et al., "SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models", arxiv.org 7/20/2023:

I've always been fond of this pretty, little word, but I seldom use it in my own speech (maybe once every five or ten years), because it seems too triumphant.  This morning, however, after a long, numerical list of steps that some colleagues and I need to take, followed by a conclusion we wished to reach, I just blurted out "Voilà!" and felt good about it.

…if you haven't noticed, is good. There are many applications, from conversing with Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant, to getting voicemail in textual form, to automatically generated subtitles, and so on. For linguists, one parochial (but important) application is accurate automatic transcription of speech corpora, and the example that motivates this post comes from that world.

Sign on a noodle shop in Xindan, Taiwan:

(Via Google Street View)

Catching up on some oldish e-mail, I came upon this interesting one from Francois Lang dated 5/9/23:

I asked several Indo-Europeanist colleagues:

In Hittite, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian (Indic and Persian), Greek, Albanian, Germanic, Armenian, Celtic, Anatolian, Italic, Lithuanian, Balto-Slavic, Macedonian, Phrygian, and other IE languages, do you ever find reflexes (derivatives) of these two PIE roots in close association / linkage with each other?

PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.    could also be related to "king", which is of uncertain derivation

PIE root *gwen- "woman."  ("queen; gynecology")

Alex Bauman sent in this real-estate ad from Singapore:

For the fully hyper-hyphenated experience, click here…

The following photo is from Guanghzhou and was taken recently by David Lobina's partner who’s there now. 

From a photo sharing group on Facebook:

…though they often do a credible job of faking it.  An interesting (preprint) paper by Konstantine Arkoudas, "GPT-4 Can't Reason", brings the receipts.

No, I'm not talking about the eye parasite called Loa loa (a filarial nematode), which is also called eyeworm.  I'm talking about an image that gets stuck in your brain the same way an earworm (also called brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome) gets stuck in your head.  We've talked about earworms a lot on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a few examples), but I don't think we've ever mentioned eyeworms before.

No, come to think of it, I did use the word "eyeworm" once before (here), but that was in reference to the ubiquitous subtitles of Chinese films, even those intended for Chinese audiences, which — upon first glance — may strike one as unnecessary excrescences crawling around in the viewer's field of vision, except for the reasons I listed in the cited post, which lead Chinese audiences to prefer or even need them to understand the films they are watching.

[This is a guest post by Don Keyser in response to "Sinitic semiliteracy" (6/5/23)]

Over brunch the other day, a question came up that I've wondered about in the past: Who was the "Major Dickason" of Major Dickason's Blend?

Skipping my imaginary histories, here's the real story.