Karttunen’s Word Play

[I know that this blog is being frustratingly silent these days. I’ll have to figure out what to do about that, but I’m too busy even for that. In the mean time, I’ll try to post a few snippets.]

The 2007 “Lifetime Achievement Award” of the Association for Computational Linguistics went to Lauri Karttunen. There is a video of the award ceremony (the award was announced by ACL Chair Mark Steedman) and Lauri’s acceptance speech. The written version of the talk appeared in the December 2007 issue of Computational Linguistics:

Karttunen, Lauri. 2007. Word play. Computational Linguistics 33(4): 443–467. doi:10.1162/coli.2007.33.4.443.

Lauri has posted the pdf of the article on his website. It’s a delightful read, somewhat along the lines of Barbara Partee’s reminiscences. Highly recommended.

First Article Published in S&P: Barker & Shan on Donkeys

Today is a big day for semantics, for open access, open science publishing in our field: the first research article in our new journal Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P) has been published!

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1(1): 1–42. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.

We will comment on this occasion further on the editors’ blog. But take a look at the pdf and enjoy the extensive hyper-features: active links from the text to the bibliography, clickable DOIs in the bibliography for most of the cited literature, links from example numbers in the text to the examples, etc. Also, note that the bibliography style follows the guidelines agreed to by a working group of linguistics journal editors. In particular, note that our bibliography style gives full first names (looking at you, Springer!).

Of course, we welcome any comments and feedback. Just send us email at editors@semprag.org or comment here or on the editors’ blog.

And, given that all of us are using the summer to write new papers, please submit your best work to S&P. We’re ready to give you the best publishing experience you have ever had.

Update: See now also David’s post on “Donkeys in Cyberspace” on Language Log, which has a growing comment thread where we learn that the problem of donkey anaphora is not an obvious problem.

i-within-i?

In a short review of the sequel to “The Graduate”, we find this in today’s Boston Globe:

Forty years have passed since Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson were last seen breathless on the back seat of a bus, staring at a future that suddenly seemed as dense and inscrutable as a new planet. The indelible scene, of course, is from the movie “The Graduate,” which consigned Charles Webb, on whose novel it was based, to the bizarre fate of being the unknown author of his most famous work.

“the unknown author of his most famous work” — Discuss.

Look at all articles