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An emoji dance notation system for TikTok dance tutorials 👀💃
This blog post is more of a quick record of my thoughts than a full in-depth analysis, because when I saw this I immediately wanted to start writing about it. Basically, TikTok is a social media app...
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Who all studies language? 🤔 A brief disciplinary tour
Buckle up friends, we’re going on a tour! One of the nice things about human language is that no matter what your question about it might be, someone, somewhere has almost certainly already asked the...
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What you can, can’t and shouldn’t do with social media data
Earlier this summer, I gave a talk on the promise & pitfalls of social media data for the Joint Statistical Meetings. While I don’t think there’s a recording of the talk, enough people asked for...
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Are emoji sequences as informative as text?
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how much information we really convey with emoji. I was recently at the 1st International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social...
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How do we use emoji?
Those of you who know me may know that I’m a big fan of emoji. I’m also a big fan of linguistics and NLP, so, naturally, I’m very curious about the linguistic roles of emoji. Since I figured some of...
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Analyzing Multilingual Data
This blog post is a little different from my usual stuff. It’s based on a talk I gave yesterday at the first annual Data Institute Conference. As a result, it’s aimed at a slightly more technical...
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Where can you find language data on the web?
In the course of my day-to-day work on Kaggle’s public data platform, I’ve learned a lot about the ecosystem of language data on the web (or at least the portions of it that have been annotated in...
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Are “a female” and “a male” used differently?
In this first part of this two-post series, I looked at how “a male” and “a female” were used on Twitter. I found that one part of speech tagger tagged “male” as a proper noun really frequently (which...
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Preference for wake words varies by user gender
I recently read a very interesting article on the design of aspects of choosing a wake word, the word you use to turn on a voice-activated system. In Star Trek it’s “Computer”, but these days two of...
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What’s the difference between & and +?
So if you’re like me, you sometimes take notes on the computer and end up using some shortcuts so you can keep up with the speed of whoever’s talking. One of the short cuts I use a lot is replacing the...
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Can a computer write my blog posts?
This post is pretty special: it’s the 100th post I’ve made since starting my blog! It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this so long. I started blogging in 2012, in my final year of undergrad, and now...
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Google’s speech recognition has a gender bias
In my last post, I looked at how Google’s automatic speech recognition worked with different dialects. To get this data, I hand-checked annotations more than 1500 words from fifty different accent tag...
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The problem with the grammar police
I’ll admit it: I used to be a die-hard grammar corrector. I practically stalked around conversations with a red pen, ready to jump out and shout “gotcha!” if someone ended a sentence with a preposition...
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How to make STEM classrooms more inclusive
This post is a bit of a departure from my usual content. I’m assuming two things about you, the reader: You teach/learn in a STEM classroom You’d like to be more inclusive If that’s not you, you might...
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What’s the best way to block the sound of a voice?
Atif asked: My neighbor talks loudly on the phone and I can’t sleep. What is the best method to block his voice noise? Great question Atif! There are few things more distracting than hearing someone...
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Does reading a story affect the way you talk afterwards? (Or: do linguistic...
So tomorrow is my generals exam (the title’s a bit misleading: I’m actually going to be presenting research I’ve done so my committee can decide if I’m ready to start work on my dissertation–fingers...
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Tweeting with an accent
I’m writing this blog post from a cute little tea shop in Victoria, BC. I’m up here to present at the Northwest Linguistics Conference, which is a yearly conference for both Canadian and American...
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Five tips for your first linguistics class*
So it’s getting to be the time of year when colleges start back up again (at least here in the US). And with that comes a whole batch of eager students taking their first linguistics class. If that’s...
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Great ideas in linguistics: Language acquisition
Courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood rng, this week’s great idea in linguistics is… language acquisition! Or, in other words, the process of learning a language. (In this case, learning your first...
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Great ideas in linguistics: Sociolinguistics
I’ll be the first to admit: for a long time, even after I’d begun my linguistics training, I didn’t really understand what sociolinguistics was. I had the idea that it mainly had to do with discourse...
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