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If you're into the Digital Humanities, you probably know about the importance of text analysis. Whereas programming languages such as Python or R allow you to do this efficiently, some people prefer to use tools which don't require any coding skills. A good example of such a tool is Voyant Tools, an open-source web-based application for text analysis. In this blog post, I will show you the basics of using Voyant Tools to analyze a corpus. Read more

Synthetic voices, or artificial voices, are part of our lives (who has never talked to iPhone's Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Microsoft Cortana?). Conversational AI, which largely relies on these synthetic voices, is currently experiencing a boom and its market is expected to grow even more in the next four years. However, even though synthetic voices might look like a very new invention, the truth is that they have been around for a long, long time (more than 200 years, actually! Read more

If you're interested in corpus linguistics, you probably know that some of the things this field involves includes searching for patterns in a group of texts (e.g., find frequent words or collocations). This can be easily done using a programming language like Python or R. But, what if you don't have much experience with programming languages? Well, this is where a tool like AntConc becomes useful! AntConc is a free corpus analysis software that can easily help you identify patterns in a collection of texts. Read more

Some weeks ago, we heard about Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who claimed that LaMDA, a chatbot that can carry unstructured conversations with people, had a 'human soul'. He came to this conclusion after having long, deep conversations with LaMDA, which he later shared with The Washington Post. What's striking about this case is that an engineer, who's supposed to have a thorough technical knowledge about how chatbots work, was fooled into believing the chatbot was actually human! Read more

What is phonetic transcription? Phonetic transcription is the use of phonetic symbols to represent speech. We could say it's a way to visually represent speech sounds, which is important because orthography often doesn't represent pronunciation accurately. Each phonetic symbol represents a sound in a spoken utterance. However, which phonetic symbol we use depends on the phonetic transcription system we follow. This means that the same dataset can be transcribed in more than one way. Read more