I'm just curious why they want web data-- what is written here seems different from both spoken English and formal writing.
My guess is that that's exactly the reason.
I, for one, wasn't looking forward to starting my day with a slaughter. Which, really, just goes to show how much I've grown
Anya ,'Sleeper'
Bureaucracy 2: Like Sartre, Only Longer
A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
amych - Jan 12, 2004 3:38:21 pm PST #6453 of 10005
Now let us crush something soft and watch it fountain blood. That is a girlish thing to want to do, yes?
Sue - Jan 12, 2004 4:19:39 pm PST #6454 of 10005
hip deep in pie
Can we turn -age words into gerunds?
t /ducks
Megan E. - Jan 12, 2004 4:30:27 pm PST #6455 of 10005
We can make new words?
*starts searching for George W. Bush interviews and speeches*
Sean K - Jan 12, 2004 4:42:01 pm PST #6456 of 10005
You can't leave me to my own devices; my devices are Nap and Eat. -Zenkitty
CROMULENT!
I'm all for the idea.
Consuela - Jan 12, 2004 5:52:51 pm PST #6457 of 10005
We are Buffistas. This isn't our first apocalypse. -- Pix
Oh my god, that's so COOOOL.
I'm all for it.
Foamy foamy foamy! AIFG!
Trudy Booth - Jan 12, 2004 7:35:36 pm PST #6458 of 10005
Greece's financial crisis threatens to take down all of Western civilization - a civilization they themselves founded. A rather tragic irony - which is something they also invented. - Jon Stewart
I t counts hastily eleventibillion the YES!
aurelia - Jan 12, 2004 9:19:29 pm PST #6459 of 10005
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Tell me a story.
That sounds very cool. Is this a situation in which we could approve certain threads for the samples to be taken from (or exclude a given thread)? I don't have a particular concern, but I could see where some people might.
Liese S. - Jan 12, 2004 9:34:10 pm PST #6460 of 10005
"Faded like the lilac, he thought."
I am so freaking pleased with this idea, and I'm still going to probably argue against it. I'm the privacy freak. I know that it sounds terrific, and I'm sure it will be used responsibly, but my inner paranoia bells are going off something awful.
But I gotta say I love the idea of affecting dictionary verbiage for all eternity. Or, you know, ten years. Whichever comes first.
MechaKrelboyne - Jan 12, 2004 11:56:03 pm PST #6461 of 10005
... and that's a Pantera's box you don't want to open. - Mister Furious
Corpsified. Definitely Corpsified.
erinaceous - Jan 13, 2004 3:13:52 am PST #6462 of 10005
A fellow makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan.
Wow, glad to see so many responses already.
It would be the words in context -- otherwise they're not data, they're just anecdotes.
We could certainly but the kibosh on releasing certain threads -- I was thinking Bitches, for example, has more personal info than any of the others. Natter, the Music, Fic, and Movie threads, and the show/spoiler threads would probably be the most valuable.
The data can be anonymized so that no user name, personal name, or place name appears. So that "I hung out in Somerville with Emily and VWbug last night" would appear as "I hung out in PLACENAME with PERSONNAME and PERSONNAME last night." Actual replacement strings would vary.
Let me know what other questions you have! Remember, I can't put foamy in the dictionary until I can show use ... like, in a major corpus of American English ...
The corpus researchers (and lexicographers) want this data specifically because it has not been professionally edited, and because it's so wide-ranging. Linguists go to great lengths to get this kind of data -- one project gave free phone calls to grad students as long as they let themselves be recorded, in order to get spoken language data.