Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly paradoxical about this claim. We might like ‘key elements’ to be plannable so that we can account for them on budgets and balance sheets. But here is an element that I think can make a huge difference to the quality of our scientific work yet that is pretty much the antithesis of gantt charts, KPIs and work packages. (Then again, who has ever thought that gantt charts c...| The Ideophone
Over on the Futures of Language website we are advertising a PhD and a postdoc position. If you are interested in fundamental questions at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look. We offer a number of resources:| The Ideophone
Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know I'm not so much in for an exciting journey to a fascinating world as a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.| The Ideophone
I had a very weird exchange with Oxford University Press the other day that made me realise how deeply they are implicated in the surveillance capitalism we’ve grown accustomed to from Elsevier and the like. The good news: there are plenty of alternatives. I already favoured open access diamond publishers and have in recent years declined many invitations to contribute to this or that handbook (as my colleagues can attest — sorry, Oxford Handbook of Iconicity editors). I won’t be publis...| The Ideophone
Van eind 2018 tot halverwege 2024 had ik het voorrecht om onderzoeksleider te zijn van het Vidi-project "Elementaire deeltjes van de taal" met een Vidi-talentbeurs van NWO, de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Dit zijn enkele notities uit de eindrapportage.| The Ideophone
GPT based text generators like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have rapidly become a “cultural sensation”. This document provides scientific background and guidance on how to think critically and mindfully about these tools in academic writing and research.| The Ideophone
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and must write about it. Warning: snark detected. This is a new paper by Green, Kong, Brysbaert, and Keogh with the following abstract:| The Ideophone
TL;DR: It takes two to tell a story: narrator and audience. Response tokens or continuers like ‘mhmm’ play a key role in making stories work. Two new papers extend the study of continuers across languages and modalities. Work by Lutzenberger et al. reveals the importance of minimal tokens that don’t occupy the main articulators in British Sign Language and Spoken British English. And a study by Börstell showcases a neat methodological replication and extension of the sequential search ...| The Ideophone
For years now I have had a boilerplate rejection notice for review requests from Elsevier journals. (See the Cost of Knowledge pledge for why.) I include it here, feel free to remix and reuse: | The Ideophone
Lab rotations are a regular feature of work in my research groups. Students join the lab and figure out a project they want to work on themselves. While this typically results in at least a serviceable final report and good learning outcomes for the student, occassionally the work done lends itself to wider dissemination. If a student feels motivated and we can support them, we may try to move towards publication. In the past few years we’ve produced several such student-led papers. What we...| The Ideophone
Suppose you hear a word like Korean tuˈgɯndugɯn and two possible meanings ‘heartbeat’ or ‘gentle movement’. Most people pick the first (as we found in 2016). Or suppose you hear that same word and see the meaning ‘heartbeat’ and you’re asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, how well form and meaning fit together. Most people will go high (4.7 on average, as we found).| The Ideophone
Nithikul Mimjulrath’s process of translating a hand-knotted cup into a digital representationKnots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. As Thai textile artist and designer Nithikul Nimkulrath (2024) has pointed out, knots are the kind of thing we come to know “through and in making”. One of her artworks (see photo) explorers the materiality of knots by translating a physical, hand-knotted container into a 3D render. | The Ideophone
Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.| The Ideophone
Following on from my post about setting up my kids with a Raspberry Pi 400 as their first computer, here I share how I’ve made the system easy to manage remotely and how I imposed some light parental controls, all while keeping the system open to tinkering. It will be a matter of time until they discover how to break out of it — indeed I see that as part of the challenge of discovery that I hope they’ll take on.| The Ideophone
Our kids (6 and 9) wanted to learn to type, and I think it’s useful for them to become computer literate sooner rather than later, so I spent some time figuring out options. We’ve had tablets around the house for a while, and they’ve benefited from some simple and creative android apps in learning to read and getting a first taste of programming with scratch. But a touch-only interface has its limitations, and tablets are primarily devices for media consumption.| The Ideophone
Readers of this blog will know that I’m an avid user of Zotero and of the reMarkable paper tablet. Zotero is a supreme reference manager and reMarkable is simply the best when it comes to reading and note-taking.| The Ideophone
I am extremely happy to announce that NWO will be funding the project Futures of Language over the next five years. We will start in September 2024; stay tuned for news about positions for postdocs, PhDs, and research software engineers.| The Ideophone
I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations. It was also a blog post on here that became my first academic publication (a commentary in Science), which definitely did something to change my p...| The Ideophone
Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps the one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.1| The Ideophone
Why do jokes come in rounds, like drinks? And what makes them an interactional safe haven in a group therapy session? These are some of the unlikely questions you encounter if you’re reading Harvey Sacks’ Lectures on Conversation, a two volume compendium of his groundbreaking work on the structure of conversation. Originally given in the 1960s and early 1970s, these lectures are full of original insights and sparkling observations. Here’s the relevant bit on jokes from Lecture 12 in par...| The Ideophone
We have a new paper out in which we argue that the robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is normally thought of as a kind of remedial procedure: a system for handling clarification questions, just one of those things we need to stay out of communicative trouble. Simply put (and oversimplifying only a bit), we argue we wouldn’t have complex language if it weren’t for this system of interactive repair.| The Ideophone
There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post:| The Ideophone
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.| The Ideophone
