Just ignore me if I ask too much. Anyway, if one has written a paragraph highlighting a number of key points and one wants to summarize it as a recap (but it is not really a conclusion). Is it formal to say, "All in all, bla bla is so and so." ?
@Tom: You should probably use a more specific term if it fits better with the concept you are dealing with in this scientific paper; if not, use money. Currency and liquidity are different things.
Favorite recent expression "lucked up" [poker term] slang, meaning someone got lucky and won a hand even after making a mistake (cf. "fucked up" meaning made a mistake).
All in all sounds slightly informal to me, but acceptable as long as the rest of the article isn't very formal. I'd probably use something like "in summary" or "to summarize". Or "in short": that might be a good middle-of-the-road word.
I caught myself using "may" a lot in an essay where I am trying to prove that something "may" happen (aka, I am not saying that it always has to be the case).
Eg.: Consumers may be inclined to ....
I wonder if there is any way to avoid using may but still say that it is not definite
So much that I seem to be using it in 3 sentences after each other
Three consecutive sentences (just wanted to use that word).
@RegDwight alright. I am afraid to paste the whole sentence as it may very well get noticed by plagiarism detectors, causing me to get sanctioned for copying my own essay.
@RegDwight true, I'm sure that the web is searched though.. but that is a whole different topic :)
I can imagine why SE never added private conversations, as there are some really important people around here who'd just get spammed, but it's a real shame in some cases :)
In English there is only one word for grade of friendship: friends. All of you agree that friends are different: with some of them you just drank beer few times, other you know for many years and you build strong bonds to them. There should be different words for that!
In Russian there are three...
So, @Kosmonaut, are there jobs for people with linguistics degrees outside of academia? Do the creators of speech-recognition software use that discipline?
I was thinking that a lot of work could be done to narrow down the processing of language to domain-specific contexts. The way chess programs trim the logic tree to concentrate on the most promising lines, that sort of thing.
That wouldn't work in all cases, of course, but it would make a lot of processing much faster.
Probably I'm talking about stuff that's already happened.
They could more easily have touchtone controlled menus — I honestly think those who use voice-activated prompts are attempting to make things more pleasant.
@Kosmonaut — I have a voice-activated audio system in my car, and it constantly gets things wrong. Its "best guess" is often so far off it's not even funny.
Yeah. And it was interesting to see how Watson, with its ginormous database lookup, would frequently misunderstand questions in a way that humans never would. Not often, but sometimes.
Have there been experiments with large-scale, semi-automatic "learning", by having thousands of volunteers or cheap labourers "recaptcha" endless amounts of spoken language?
Look at face recognition. Who would have predicted we'd have come so far with that. My iPhoto recognizes pictures of my kids when then they were little after having only seen their grown-up faces.
@Cerberus If you use a general speech recognition system, you spend hours and hours in training sessions, training the software to the exact nuances of your voice only, and it STILL gets 1/20 words wrong.
@Kos: You mean there really aren't any patterns across different speakers that could be learnt by a computer by feeding millions of text-corresponding-to-speech bits to it?
These systems also have all phoneme transitions, rather than just the phonemes, so you have every two- or even three-phoneme combination in the database
"[The scientists] synthesized three simultaneous wavering tones. Physically, the sound was nothing at all like speech, but the tones followed the same contours as the bands of energy in the sentence 'Where were you a year ago?' Volunteers described what they heard as 'science fiction sounds' or 'computer bleeps'.
"A second group of volunteers was told that the sounds had been generated by a bad speech synthesizer. They were able to make out many of the words, and a quarter of them could write down the sentence perfectly. The brain can hear speech content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech. Indeed, sine-wave speech is how mynah birds fool us. They have a valve on each bronchial tube and can control them independently, producing two wavering tones which we hear as speech."
@Reg: Interesting. That is why I was wondering whether the thresholds of what make speech intelligible could be learnt by a computer by feeding it endless streams of input.
@Kos: Okay, but if its only input is what scientists fed it by hand, perhaps lots of input could make a difference. Patterns could emerge that scientists hadn't thought of; perhaps the computer shouldn't be using the concept of phonemes so much, who knows?
"Our brains can flip between hearing something as a bleep and hearing it as a word because phonetic perception is like a sixth sense. When we listen to speech the actual sounds go in one ear and out of the other; what we perceive is language. Our experience of words and syllables, of the "b"-ness of b and the "ee"-ness of ee is as separable from our experience of pitch and loudness as lyrics are from a score.
"Sometimes, as win sine-wave speech, the senses of hearing and phonetics compete over which gets to interpret a sound, and our perception jumps back and forth. Sometimes the two sense simultaneously interpret a single sound.
"If one takes a tape recording of da, electronically removes the initial chriplike portion that distinguishes the da from ga and ka, and plays the chirp to one ear and the residue to the other, what people hear is a chirp in one ear and da in the other—a single clip of sound is perceived simultaneously as d-ness and a chirp."
@Kos: I meant that perhaps the computer shouldn't be thinking in terms of phonemes, phoneme transitions, or whatever categories scientists throw at it at all (not saying that would work, but it might be worth a try to give the computer nothing but spectral diagrams and corresponding bits of text; who knows...).
@Kos: No, not at all: I was thinking of no tagging at all, except that the sound of a spoken sentence is tagged with the same sentence in written text. Or perhaps entire paragraphs would be better.
@Kosmonaut — This is very true. When I was first learning Japanese I would get tapes of Japanese TV shows, and it was amazing how many sentences I couldn't parse even after listening to them over and over again. Then I got to a point where I would filter out most of the nonessential sounds and focus on overall meaning, then work back inwards to interpret those sounds from the standpoint of clarifying a general meaning. I think that's how we interpret our own language, BTW.
@Reg: That da experiment is a great example of how much work the brain does in creating our interpretation of sounds and language, as opposed to the ear.
@Robusto I'm having similar fun watching videos of sign language conversations and trying to filter the "noise" to get at the underlying signs. It's surprisingly hard if you don't know the signer.
We start with a general context for what people are saying, then we go to our memory of what has been said in similar situations, adding in what we know of the speech patterns of individuals or groups, then we focus on major verbs and nouns that we can hear, and then fill in the rest. It's all done in post-processing, but it happens very quickly (for native speakers).
For beginning learners, it's virtually impossible because they have been learning a language word by word, and expect to hear and understand individual words.
In the office, we've been having a discussion about the grammar in a sentence and have differing opinions about what is right and what is wrong... It is a very minor issue but is still bugging me :)
The sentence in question is "a wide range of features is available" which sounds more natural to ...
@Robusto One anecdote related to that. One German friend of mine told me about a colleague who was American but spoke rather good German (although he was clearly not native). He said that one day, the American wrote him an email, and he realized that the American was just absolutely horrible at getting the right gender or case endings. He hadn't noticed that it was that bad before.
@Kos: People everywhere around the internet would be paid to transcribe a few sentences a time. That would result in a huge pool of raw material for the computer to work with. The hypothesis would be that lots of material might have unforeseen benefits.
@Cerberus I'm not saying there couldn't be SOME way to do this, but again I think you are grossly underestimating how hard it is to accurately transcribe spoken language.
Possible Duplicates:
“A total of 10 babies is sleeping.” v.s. “A total of 10 babies are sleeping.” v.s. “Ten babies in total are sleeping.”
Is “a total of 10 payments” singular or plural?
A total of 315 questionnaires was received fr...
@Kos: I have tried it once or twice, so I have an idea of how arbitrary some choices must be. I just don't think they would be so arbitrary as to be useless. But this experiment doesn't seem practicable now anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
@Kosmonaut — @RegDwight pointed me to a Paulaner beer commercial which had a Japanese guy ordering beer in Japanese. I got nearly everything right away, but there was a small section where he spoke so rapidly I couldn't parse the words, even on repeat listening. (Possibly the spot was also digitally time-compressed, which happens a lot these days.) But the important parts of the sentence were clear.
@Cerberus It's an interesting idea, but I think we've done large-scale processing of this kind, just maybe not as huge as you are talking about. I think the problem is that it looks like the returns on this grow logarithmically. We are at the point where we are at 97% and with a huge amount of further effort we could squeeze it to 97.4%, or something like that.
But we can't get that last bit without something else besides statistics (at least with what we can do now).
It is a mystery how our brains are sometimes unable to perform the simplest tasks, tasks that they are able to perform perfectly fine with exactly the same materials at other times in different circumstances. Semantic satiation comes to mind.
I dunno how this is related, in fact it's like the exact opposite thing, but. I always find it striking how at parties or in crowds with many people talking at once, it's just noise, but if you look at the lips of any particular person, even if they are across the street/room, you can suddendly filter them out.
@Reg: It is hard to be sure whether you are just lip reading while hearing nothing intelligible at all, and imagining the speech, or you are really interpreting the faint bits of sound better that you can really hear.
@Kos: Right, optical illusions might very well be related.
When there is white noise you know approximately how many words might have been said, but with a period of silence you are not expecting that to mean something.
@Robusto Yes, certainly it is something like that. The amazing thing is that the white noise isn't just on top of the speech, it replaces the speech in those portions. But when you hear it, you'd swear the noise was just on top of it.
"The psychologist George Miller played tapes of sentences in background noise and asked people to repeat back exactly what they heard. Some of the sentences followed the rules of English syntax and made sense. [...] Others were created by scrambling the words within phrases to create colorless-green-ideas sentences, grammatical but nonsensical. [...]
"A third kind was created by scrambling the phrase structure but keeping related words together. [...] Finally, some sentences were utter word salad. [...] People did best with the grammatical sensible sentences, worse with the grammatical nonsense and the ungrammatical sense, and worst of all with the ungrammatical nonsense.
"A few years later the psychologist Richard Warren taped sentences like The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city, excised the first s from legislatures, and spliced in a cough. Listeners could not tell that any sound was missing."
Righto, I'm off. Thanks for the guidance folks. I will try to be here more often without leeching all this valuable (I almost did a "valueable" there!) info from you all =)
We've all been overwhelmed with work, or saw an underwhelming movie... but it occurred to me that I've never heard anyone use the root word, whelm.
whelm (verb)
1. to submerge; engulf.
2. to overcome utterly; overwhelm: whelmed by misfortune.
If whelm is "to overcome utterly," then why is it y...
Okay, so this is kind of a strange question... but a group on my fraternity calls itself "Popeye" and they refer to themself als "Popeyers". But I got the feeling that that isn't really spelled right.
But what would the correct English plural for "Popeye" be?
When pluralizing family (last) names that also happen to be common English words, does the pluralization follow the same rules as the common word?
For example, "the Smith family" can be pluralized as "the Smiths", but what if your family name is Wolf or Fish? Would it be "the Wolfs" or "the Wol...
Okay, so this is kind of a strange question... but a group on my fraternity calls itself "Popeye" and they refer to themself als "Popeyers". But I got the feeling that that isn't really spelled right.
But what would the correct English plural for "Popeye" be?
Is there a single word to describe an object or idea that is so desirable that everyone wants to attain it but once they have it they are immediately cursed?
The idea is often used in literature--some examples:
In Lord of the Rings, the 'one ring' is a perfect example of this.
In Guy de Maupas...
I flagged with: “Seeing how most recent answers are turning into jokes, and a second bounty was offered (while the first one was awarded to a joke), I suggest making this a community wiki.”
people set bounties on questions without it being clear (or them saying) what they expect or want
I placed a bounty on one of my questions, expecting to select the bounty winner after the 1 week period had ended (assuming that this would allow everyone who might be interested to have a chance at providing a possibly winning answer.) This morning I went to choose the bounty winner and discove...
F'x's answer is completely correct with regards to the usage of the legal term "null and void": Both refer to the same meaning of invalidity. As best as I can tell, "void" is the most appropriate of the two to use if you want to trim your word count.
For everything else, however, the terms do ha...
If your target audience is the world, then you target not only people with a knowledge of American English, British English, and so on, but also people like myself, to whom English is not a mother tongue but a foreign language. If reaching these people is important to you, then you might want to ...
This is called paraprosdokian.
A paraprosdokian (from Greek "παρα-", meaning "beyond" and "προσδοκία", meaning "expectation") is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpre...
It was worth maybe 3 or 4 upvotes, but the question had the sexual aspect to it so naturally it got featured.
And then there's this one that totally glommed onto the popularity of Kurt Cobain:
Well, in your own small way you are recognizing it. I'm sure if Nirvana were not an obliteration of consciousness, Kurt Cobain would be smiling and nodding in your direction right now.
Well, uh, I don't know quite how to tell you this, MrHen, but it's probably time we talked. You need a new gravatar. Out-of-the-box gravatars are all well and good for noobs, but you've been here a while. People are starting to talk. Just sayin'.