Let’s Come Somewhere Else
The Semantics of “Come” and “Go”
Syntax textbooks everywhere love, need, and wanna explain what’s up with “wanna”.
When do we use “himself/herself” instead of “him/her”? It’s a more tricky story than you might think, and it all comes down to a simple (albeit unsual) relationship with trees.
An introduction to linguistic modality, as modeled by possible
worlds. In particular, what is the difference between the worlds
“may” and “might”?
This post is a short introduction to Bessel’s correct — an solution to an unexpected problem in statistics. As it turns out, estimating the variance of a collection of samples the way you might think will almost always underestimate the true variance!
A beginners introduction into how the hell you read those proof trees that all the scary logicians keep using. Filled with lots of exercises to keep you busy!
The Winograd Schema Challenge is an alternative to the Turing
Test, with some very practical advantages. The test itself boils
so much down into a single, simple, and well-defined linguistic
function: anaphora resolution.
Did you try and read my post on Winograd Schema, and realize you don’t understand or have never heard of the Turing Test? If so, this post is for you!
A very brief introduction to Discourse Representation Theory, a method of using dynamic scope to better model natural language. Featuring Russell and his donkey.
If two things are equal, they can always replace each other, no? Well, “the number of Godfather Movies” equals “3”. My friend Alison only knows the first movie. Why is it that I might say “Alison thinks the number of Godfather Movies is 1”, but I wouldn’t say “Alison thinks 3 is 1”?
A German writing exercise. Es gibt ein Wort, das man stets in der Kletterhalle hört — “Beta”. “Darf ich dir das Beta geben?” “Kann ich ein bisschen Beta bekommen?” Was hießt es, und wieso benutzen wir es überhaupt?
In Part II we dive into the work of Anastasia Giannakidou, and
come up with a new, more general, more powerful, and more correct
licensing condition: the nonveridicality approach.
“Any” is such a common word; with “for-all”-like semantic. “Any” has hardly ever troubled anyone. Then again… maybe “any” has troubled anyone.
How to write more general makefiles. An “easymake oven,” if you will. Covers pointers for organizing your C / C++ projects.
A proof-of-concept experiment written in Go to understand static monomorphising. Given a program in a toy dummy language with a Haskell-like type system, Paratype will perform type inference and type checking. If type checking passed, it will generate a monomorphic code realization of the given program.