Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

influencer – the word, not the status – is one of the most influential buzzwords of our era.  Continue reading...

Whatever name you go by in plea agreements and apocalyptic prophecies, I'm sure you appreciate discretion. In that spirit, here's my latest roundup of terms that beat around the bush so many times they could give George Orwell vertigo.  Continue reading...

Accurate and dependable machine translation has long been a dream among linguists and computer scientists alike. Will computers get there eventually? Possibly.  Continue reading...

While millions of people are tweeting and retweeting every day, a small fraction of them are also subtweeting, and if news stories are to be believed, they are not doing so very successfully. Recent news stories alerted me to the idea of subtweeting and got me thinking about the conversational aspects of Tweets and their sub-cousins.  Continue reading...

A couple of years ago I wrote about irritating the habit of clickbait purveyors to withhold critical information in the text of their clickable link in order to tantalize readers. The promise is that the thirst for missing but suggested information will be slaked with a simple click. Since then, the tendency has gotten worse.  Continue reading...