Language Log

From a recent article on the Vanity Fair site by Abigail Tracy ("'There's Blood on the Hands of Members of Congress': Frustrated Democrats Debate Strategy as Mitch McConnell Holds Gun Control in His Pocket," published Aug. 6):

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who was elected weeks before the 2012 mass shooting in Newton, Connecticut, expressed dismay at the lack of inaction in Congress.

Obligatory screenshot:

It's our old friend, misnegation. Murphy was surely expressing dismay at the lack of action, or inaction, in Congress.

Thai sign over a sink in a restroom, from Alexander Bukh on Facebook:

From Nora Castle, who came across this restaurant which has just opened in Coventry, England:

China Daily News headline:

"Xinjiang Uygur sees big influx of visitors", by Cheng Si (8/7/19)

N.B.:  "Domestic travelers accounted for 98 percent of those visiting the region, while the top three sources of overseas visitors were Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia."

Never mind that it's hard to imagine why tourists would be rushing to the world's largest concentration camp.  The wording of the title left me reeling:  what is this "Xinjiang Uygur" that is seeing a "big influx of visitors"?  As the subject of a passive sentence about an increase of tourists, that locution strikes me as ungrammatical and unidiomatic.  (If they changed the last word and wrote "Xinjiang Uygur sees big influx of borrowings", then I could understand the first two words as referring to the standard Uyghur language of the region.)

I'm not the only person who feels that  way.

A Twitter thread from Incunabula, starting here:

Language development – in this case sign language – happens in real time, as the need arises. To ensure needed supplies reach them quickly, Hong Kong’s protesters have developed a unique system of hand signals, to send messages through the crowd about what equipment is required. pic.twitter.com/1G5YTGhya0

— Incunabula (@incunabula) August 5, 2019

From the Facebook page of the Hong Kong poet, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, president of PEN Hong Kong, as reproduced in Andrea Lingenfelter, "At This Moment, Everyone Is a Revolution: The Poems of Tammy Ho Lai-Ming and the Hong Kong Crisis", Blog // Los Angeles Review of Books (8/4/19):

Taylor Telford, "‘Emotion detection’ AI is a $20 billion industry. New research says it can’t do what it claims", WaPo 7/31/2019:

In just a handful of years, the business of emotion detection — using artificial intelligence to identify how people are feeling — has moved beyond the stuff of science fiction to a $20 billion industry. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft tout software that can analyze facial expressions and match them to certain emotions, a would-be superpower that companies could use to tell how customers respond to a new product or how a job candidate is feeling during an interview. But a far-reaching review of emotion research finds that the science underlying these technologies is deeply flawed.

The problem? You can’t reliably judge how someone feels from what their face is doing.

A group of scientists brought together by the Association for Psychological Science spent two years exploring this idea. After reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the five researchers concluded that the relationship between facial expression and emotion is nebulous, convoluted and far from universal.

I recently had reasons to consult a book published in 1961, "Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects", Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Volume XII, edited by Roman Jakobson.

The table of contents:

W. V. Quine – Logic as a source of syntactical insights
Noam Chomsky – On the notion “Rule of Grammar”
Hilary Putnam – Some issues in the theory of grammar
Henry Hiż – Congrammaticality, batteries of transformations and grammatical categories
Nelson Goodman – Graphs for linguistics
Haskell B. Curry – Some logical aspects of grammatical structure
Yuen Ren Chao – Graphic and phonetic aspects of linguistic and mathematical symbols
Murray Eden – On the formalization of handwriting
Morris Halle – On the role of simplicity in linguistic descriptions
Robert Abernathy – The problem of linguistic equivalence
Hans. G. Herzberger – The joints of English
Anthony G. Oettinger – Automatic syntactic analysis and the pushdown store
Victor H. Yngve – The depth hypothesis
Gorden E. Peterson and Frank Harary – Foundations in phonemic theory
Joachim Lambek – On the calculus of syntactic types
H. A. Gleason, Jr. – Genetic relationship among languages
Benoit Mandelbrot – On the theory of word frequencies and on related Markovian models of discourse
Charles F. Hockett – Grammar for the hearer
Rulon Wells – A measure of subjective information
Roman Jakobson – Linguistics and communication theory

Photograph in the Wall Street Journal, "Hong Kong Protesters Fill Streets in District With History of Violent Clashes:  Police are under pressure to contain weeks of tear-gas-soaked demonstrations against mainland China’s growing influence", by John Lyons and Joyu Wang (8/3/19):

A cartoonist and her collaborator have been arrested in China for being "spiritually Japanese" (jīng Rì 精日).  They have also been accused of "insulting China" (rǔ Huá 辱华).  The latter term is transparent, and I've been hearing it a lot for the last couple of decades, whereas the former term is morphologically more difficult to understand (lit., "spirit Ja[pan]") and is new to me.

• "Chinese Cartoonist, Collaborator Arrested for Unpatriotic Comics:  Authorities say the pair shared hundreds of comics online that ‘twisted Chinese history’", Hoi Ying Lo, Sixth Tone (7/30/19)
• "Chinese cartoonist detained by police for ‘insulting China’", Qin Chen, Inkstone News (7/31/19)

In "Contextualized Muppet Embeddings" (2/13/2019) I noted the advent of ELMo ("Embeddings from Language Models") and BERT ("Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers"), and predicted ERNiE, GRoVEr, KERMiT, …

I'm happy to say that the first of these predictions has come true:

"Baidu’s ERNIE 2.0 Beats BERT and XLNet on NLP Benchmarks", Synced 7/30/2019
"Baidu unveils ERNIE 2.0 natural language framework in Chinese and English", VentureBeat 7/30/2019

Actually I'm late reporting this, since ERNIE 1.0 came out in March:

"Baidu’s ERNIE Tops Google’s BERT in Chinese NLP Tasks", Synced 3/25/2019

But I'm ashamed to say that the Open System for Classifying Ambiguous Reference (OSCAR) is still just an idea, though I did recruit a collaborator who agreed in principle to work with me on it.

So, kurzgesagt, reads the text that runs along all four sides of this two-millennia-old iron writing instrument excavated from an archeological site in London six years ago:

"FDA approves first novel drug to treat medical burnout":

TWISP, WA – The US Food and Drug Administration today approved Peaceaudi (Idongivafumab) injection for intravenous use for the treatment of medical burnout.

“Medical burnout is a serious condition, which affects thousands of doctors across the country. The effects of burnout have untold consequences, and could significantly shorten the careers of physicians if untreated,” said Arnold J. Palmer, MD, assistant to the regional manager for drug development of the FDA.

“This announcement marks the first time a drug has been specifically approved to treat medical burnout. Idongivafumab’s unique ability to target and inhibit C-suite peptides, as well the entire electronic health record (EHR) cascade, represents a quantum leap in burnout science."