January 15, 2004

A new linguistics weblog: Semantic Compositions

On January 13th, 2004, an anonymous author kicked off a weblog named "Semantic Compositions," announcing the intent "to expose and hopefully popularize some of the ideas to come out of theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as related disciplines like computer science and psychology." Welcome, neighbor!

SC's writer self-identifies as "a commercially employed computational linguist with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, a graduate degree in computational linguistics, and additional training in electrical engineering and music".

(S)he provides enough additional information that a nosy person could probably complete the identification with a bit of web searching. I'm not a nosy person, so I'll limit myself to running SC's text so far through the Gender Genie, which thinks SC is male -- Female Score: 2329, Male Score: 4186. I'll take this as license to refer to SC's author as "he", "him" and "his", subject to correction of course.

[Update: Language Hat points out that the very next sentence past the passage I quoted above reads "He also holds a patent in search engine design, and as of this writing, has a further patent pending for a related natural-language parser design." And while I'm in confessional mode, I have to add that the Gender Genie thinks that Rosanne at the X-Bar is even more male than Semantic Compositions: Female Score: 1937, Male Score: 4525. Adding it all up, the Overall Score is: Computational Linguistics 0, Careful Reading 1.]

Posted by Mark Liberman at January 15, 2004 02:51 PM