How to model learning of Mandarin tones with no supervision, from raw sound, with a realistic model of human language learning?
The model learns the four tones (male only near perfectly) and also replicates stages of tone learning in language acquisition. What is more difficult to learn for children

I often show students this figure and ask, how different is the green distribution (p < 0.05) from the blue distribution (p = 0.10)? Just to raise some awareness that the difference between "statistical significant" and "not significant" is not always that significant...

A scholar possessing a singular vision and a frightening working resilience, he was hounded by Stalin repression machine, exiled, denied academic positions, firewood and food; his work was largely forgotten until 2000s.

So we, who were influenced by him at the rise of DH, keep remembering.

Boris Yarkho, a Moscow formalist, was born today in 1889; his work of 1920-1930s fully anticipates computational literary studies: statistical methods used not for stylistics or attribution, but for questions of literary history and theory

Read him, if you haven't www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

no context graph: the number of translated books for children printed in Soviet Russia and USSR 1918-1984, split into “cohorts” by the moment a translated author first appears in the data. In red are mostly those “classics” who stay with us: Grimms, Andersen, Jules Verne etc.

Along these lines, I recommend Carys Craig's "The AI-Copyright Trap," which argues (in my view convincingly) that copyright law is not actually academics' friend in a context in which big tech has more money than God:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

“Newness exists only in the minds of new up and coming researchers who didn’t live through it last time. To be really blunt, newness is just ignorance of the past.”

While the world is on fire, and datasets disappear here and there, we continue our modest effort to publish open data on Russian literature. This time, the contents of the Soviet “thick journals” 1955—1990, a dataset by Daria Franklin www.dariafranklin.com. See ↓ for the data

thinking how optimality theory in phonology is like the linear modeling in social science. A model you can use when you don't have any specific theory of language, really. Epicycles all way down

How many tonal languages are out there in the world? If you need an estimate based on most comprehensive database to date, here it is: 42.7%. Concisely on a poster presented today at the #OCP22 conference in Amsterdam: zenodo.org/records/1481.... The database itself is online and has more ↓

Hi people! We need a new publisher for the proceedings of the #CHR conference. Any input is greatly appreciated!

discourse.computational-humanities-research.org/t/call-for-i...

No context graph: a yearly proportion of total print run of all books for children printed in Soviet Russia/USSR split by gender of the author. Note the fluctuations of the share of the female authors. 1931 marks the governmental ban of private publishers, 1941 the nazi invasion. →

“...it is important that everyone interested in data about culture is aware of the extent to which commercial interest prevents us from accessing data about the world in which we live, and uses the same data to shape the world for us.”
bsky.app/profile/andr...

NB: the huge thing -- an open multilingual corpus of poetry

Can we see censorship in a historical corpus when it's hidden in plain sight? Our new #CHR2024 paper with Ekaterina Vozhik and @romanlisiukov.bsky.social looks for the footprint of censorship pressure in the trends of topic co-occurrence. 1/n