Happy Christmas!

I'm off for Christmas now. Spending it with the in-laws this year. I really enjoy Christmas for two reasons

1. I'm a Catholic, so I really believe in what I'm celebrating. It's not just an excuse for a party, although as excuses for a party go, it's a pretty good one.
2. I have two small children. There's no better time of year to be Dad.

Happy Christmas everybody!

Peter Gabriel Back on Songza

A while ago, all the Peter Gabriel songs disappeared from Pete's Progcast. According to Songza's support, this was because their music provider had lost access to those tracks. That took a good proportion of my selection down. However, today it played Sledgehammer followed by In Your Eyes. Hooray!

Conlang Relay coming up

A conlang relay is being organised for next month. I'm looking forward to it.

A relay, for those of you who aren't aware, is a game where we take turns translating a passage of text from one conlang to another, passing it on with the grammar and vocabulary necessary for the next person to translate it. Each participant has a 48 hour time window to work in. Sometimes we don't quite understand what a previous participant has written and mistranslate it. Sometimes, a bit of the text can't be translated literally from one language to the next, meaning we have to adapt it. Between these two mechanisms, the text can end up completely different to what it started up as.

As usual, I'll be entering with Khangaþyagon and iljena.

How do you identify what a word means?

Seen on del.icio.us



Artificial Intelligence has been described as "Trying to get a computer to do anything that it's easier for a human to do." Trying to disambiguate the various possible senses of a word is a classic example of this - having heard a lecture from somebody who works in this field, I know that it's very difficult to create an algorithm that improves on the naive approach of just picking the most common meaning every time. 92% accuracy looks pretty impressive.