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If you are into psychology, you have probably heard about Theory of Mind before. Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states, such as beliefs, emotions, or desires, to oneself and others. It basically is the human ability to interpret what is going on in someone else's head. As you can imagine, Theory of Mind is an important cognitive skill needed for proper social interaction. Despite its importance, humans are not born with Theory of Mind. Read more

The difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence is well known: whereas humans use their brain, their memory, and other cognitive abilities, AI uses data provided by humans. In fact, AI uses a lot of data. For example, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI, are trained on huge amounts of data. The Common Crawl archive, which is LLMs' primary source of data, contains around 3 billion web pages and 400 TB of unocmpressed data. Read more

Some weeks ago, I attended a conference where several of the presenters discussed language corpora they had created as part of different research projects. During the Q&A turn of the last presenter, an award-winning researcher and creator of various corpora, one of the attendees raised their hand and asked: “I have attended five talks today discussing language corpora and each corpus employed different annotation schemes. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have a set of standards for corpus annotation that everyone could use? Read more

The arrival of ChatGPT at the end of last year has sparked a debate about how it could impact several different fields, ranging from education, to content creation, to finance and to many others. This NLP tool is the epitome of generative AI, a type of technology that “generates” content, hence the name, after being trained on large amounts of data. In this case, text data. From a linguistic perspective, it’s exciting to see how ChatGPT outputs seem natural and convincing, leading many to assert that it behaves in a human-like way. Read more

In previous blog posts, I discussed the use of software such as AntConc or Voyant to analyze corpus data. Even though these are very helpful, you can only use them to perform the range of default analyses they offer. But, what if you need more customization? Maybe you want to create your own graphs or explore your data in ways that go beyond traditional KWIC analyses and basic word frequencies. Well, then keep reading because that is totally possible! Read more