newswise.com — How do we succeed in putting our ideas into words, so that another person can understand them? This complex undertaking involves translating an idea into a one-dimensional sequence, a string of words to be read or spoken one after the other.
May 9, 2006 View in Crawl 4
surfdragonMay 9, 2006
This is a very interesting view into how humans communicate - it is interesting to think of how poetry can have a profound impact on people - saying so much w/ so few words.
tsunamisteveMay 9, 2006
If you know right now that communication happens on many levels other than (and in addition to) just plain words, there is no sense in reading this article.Flagged as 'Scientists wasting time'
brandonkingMay 9, 2006
This isn't particularly new in the way they described it, but anything that gets people reading more science gets a digg from me. Google "semantic language processing" if this whets your appetite.
warrenfalkMay 9, 2006
That's not so special. In the rural U.S. we have the one-word term "thingamajigger" that means a bunch of stuff too.And online we have "lol," and "rofl," then "roflmao," then "OMG ROFLMAO!!!! ok bye."
digbeeMay 9, 2006
For those of us who work in Natural Language, I feel that this is a bit simplistic approach. The first question I would have is are they using only one language. What also seems pretty silly is to think that after reading the Metamorphosis that with no knowledge of the human condition one can realize that it is an allegory to the human condition and not that the main character is actually a bug...The former is never explicitly stated. Furthermore, I wonder if they are saying that the words that are left are some sort of conceptual map and when "THEY" read them "THEY" can get an understanding from it. I wonder if it is like skimming...you don't look at all the words just look at some of them to get a gist. I don't know if this type of research is showing the underlinings of communication or how the researchers can reason given a set of terms.
peter303May 9, 2006
"Tarzan talk" versus languageI read a recent linguistics book speculating on how language may have evolvedfrom "Tarzan talk" to modern language. Tarzan talk is basically stringing wordstogether in short two or three word sentences without declinations and prepositionalphrases. Generally a work can relate to the one before it or after it, but connectingmore than three concepts together smooth becomes stilted. I saw a piece of literaturetranslated into tarzan talk. The main concepts come through, but not clairty and subtlty.Many animals can be trained for some tarzan talk, but rarely something more complicated.
williamtanksleyMay 9, 2006
The abstract linked to wasn't very interesting; it appears that the scientists made a bunch of reasonable guesses about the nature of communication, and then measured numbers derived from their hypothesis. I don't see any indication of falsification, just a simple setup for future exploration.
Closed AccountMay 9, 2006
In business school everything is a "widget".
flowctrlMay 10, 2006
This article is rather vacuous; the "mathematical tools" that are the real invention here, if it can be called that, were only mentioned, never described. Is there any relation whatsoever between what they've produced and brain science?This is the meat of the article: "Our contribution to research in this basic field is in the creation of mathematical tools that can be used to make the connection between concepts or ideas and the words used to express them, making it possible to trace in a speech or text the path of an idea in an abstract mathematical space. We can understand theoretically how the structure of the wording serves to transmit concepts and reconstruct them in the mind of the reader."I doubt that linguists, philosophers or neurologists will find this work useful or interesting.