Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists

Filed under: Language tools

Global voice translator

I thought this was possible only in Star Trek but no, you can have your very own Global Voice Translator built in your phone! Check this video. I want one too!

If you’d like to learn more about this amazing device go to the Pomegranate phone.

(Thanks to Erik Baković from the Language Log for this information.)

Filed under: Language tools

Visualize words

The WordNet project of Princeton University groups words into sets of cognitive synonyms. This modern thesaurus can be searched with a browser. The information you get when you search for the word travel, for example, looks like this:

However, if you check the same word in Visuwords, it’ll look like this:

Learners may find the second more helpful. The good news is that Google code has released Synonym, a
Visualization of WordNet using Force-Directed Graphs. You can download it for free. The graph will look like this:

I guess it’ll be great also as a tool helping learners of English remember/learn words faster.

BTW, a very similar tool is offered by Visual Thesaurus for $40. They also offer subscriptions to the online edition. And if you’re interested in lexicography, you may be interested to read the discussion by John E. McIntyre and Arnold M. Zwicky – they have recently presented their views on usage. There are also lots of other interesting articles.

Filed under: EFL, ESP, Language tools, Linguistics , Lexicology

An excellent text tool

This may be an old story, but I’ve just discovered a very useful tool: Complete text stripper by Tom Cobb. In a matter of seconds it helps you to get rid off all the unwanted trash in a text such as tags, figures, double spaces, returns, etc. It’s a great tool for any teacher who has to clean up texts in the process of materials writing or while building small corpora. The largest file it can manage is 50,000 words. You can also remove words very easily or replace them with other words.

BTW, Lextutor is an excellent website with lots of other useful tools. Thank you, dr. Cobb!

Filed under: Corpora, Language tools, Teaching

BYU Corpus of American English

This is truly a remarkable project and a remarkable corpus. The BYU Corpus of American English is a freely available corpus of American English that covers 5 genres of text. There are 20 million words from each year from 1990 to the present – 360 million words in all. This will allow people to observe language change in American English. My kind of stuff. Yeah!!

At the moment language change may not be that obvious, however, a span of 18 years will surely provide plenty of evidence for the changing character of language. (If I recall it well, Cristian Mair has suggested that a ten year span between two corpora can already tell a lot.)

You can search the corpus using the same interface that is used for the BYU BNC and BYU Time  corpora. Both are excellent resources.

I just love projects that allow people to use resources freely. This is what knowledge is for: to be shared with those who are interested. Something good will surely come out of it.

Bravo, professor Davies! And thank you.

Filed under: Corpora, Language tools, Linguistics, Useful sites/links