The field of natural language processing doesn't usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that's exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM's Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game. IBM had sunk tens of millions of dollars in research money to develop Watson over the past four years, and a loss would have been highly embarrassing. Luckily for IBM, and unluckily for the carbon-based life forms Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson came through with flying colors.  Continue reading...

This weekend, instead of an "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine, I contribute a piece to the Times's Week in Review section, on how Egyptian protesters have been playing with language to make their case that President Hosni Mubarak must go. (Given his defiant "non-resignation" speech Thursday night, he's not taking the hint. Update: He got the hint!) Though most of the wordplay in the protests is in Arabic, a surprising amount is in English.  Continue reading...

Tuesday night's State of the Union address by President Obama provided a fresh round of political phrase-making. As members of Congress went on a bipartisan date night, Obama called for investments to win the future and meet our Sputnik moment by doing big things. Here's a look at some of the memorable words and phrases that came out of the speech.  Continue reading...

My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine explores a topic that any owner of smartphone knows too well: the often bizarre behavior of autocorrect, which can "miscorrect" what you type into unexpected and outrageous output.  Continue reading...

Once again the American Dialect Society has performed its not-so-solemn duty in anointing a Word of the Year (aka WOTY), and the 2010 winner is app, as in, "There's an app for that." I'm just back from Pittsburgh, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and I've got the full report.  Continue reading...

Greetings from chilly Pittsburgh! The American Dialect Society is having its annual conference here, and last night we met to select the nominees for various categories of Words of the Year. On Friday evening, winners will be selected from the different categories, and then nominations will be made for the overall category of Word of the Year. What do you think the category winners should be, and what should be crowned the Word of 2010?  Continue reading...

Last week, an exciting new tool for analyzing the history of language and culture was unveiled by Google. They call it the "Ngram Viewer," and it's an interface to study the enormous corpus of historical texts scanned by Google Books. The Ngram Viewer was rolled out in conjunction with a paper in the journal Science introducing the field of "culturomics." Dennis Baron has weighed in on the significance of this development for researchers. But what about those peculiar words, culturomics and ngram?  Continue reading...