Proto-semantics: Where cognition meets language

A recent Nature paper entitled Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals has made quite a splash in the media and has some important implications for the study of linguistics and application of linguistic principles. The splashy aspect of the paper is that it allows the media to declare the discovery of purported fundamental flaws in the theory of Universal Grammar.

The more subtle implications of the research are highlighted in an Wired Science article entitled Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn. This article quotes Michael Dunn, author of the Nature paper, as stating, “What languages have in common is to be found at a much deeper level. They must emerge from more-general cognitive capacities.”

This finding suggests that if we indeed are interested in understanding our human language capacity, it is time to return to again give serious consideration to proto-semantics, the pre-lexical dimensions of meaning arising from the interaction of our human perception and the real world in which we live. The commonality underlying the way we speak arises from the similarity of our cognitive processes, which in turn can be traced to the structure and function of our brains. The way in which proto-semantics is encoded into the wide range of human languages and the variety of the evidence that we can observe of its existence are re-emerging as the more critical research questions. Whether we need a universally applicable syntactic mechanism to explain language may at this point be less relevant.

As a scientist, I personally renegotiated my relationship with Universal Grammar 15 years ago while doing the field work in theoretical linguistics on Baule in Cote d'Ivoire. No amount of pushing and shoving would fit the verb series constructions that I was studying into a framework determined exclusively by settings of universal language parameters previously identified in other languages. It appeared to be a classic case of West Africa Wins Again. My laptop held up wonderfully under humidity, sand and travel in the Cote d'Ivoire -- but my fine theory failed miserably.

One aspect of Baule that I looked at in detail is the conditions under which it is possible to omit a pronoun object in a sentence. In answer to the question "Did you beat the drum?" one replies "Yes, I beat", which must be translated into English as "Yes, I beat it". You leave out the pronoun because (simplifying somewhat) the drum is an object whose purpose is to be beaten (in the sense of played). The functional relationship in the real world as perceived by humans makes the verb and its object inextricable with respect to their meaning. The pronoun is considered redundant and can (in fact, must be since the effect is encoded into the grammar of the language) left out.

Contrast that with "Did you see the drum?" and the answer "Yes, I saw it". Here, the acting of seeing and the drum itself do not have a tight connection in the cognitive conceptualization of the world. The drum is seen because it has a physical existence, but it is not explicitly designed to be seen nor can it be considered an object typical of the sorts of objects that are seen by humans. In the answer "Yes, I saw it." it is not possible to omit the pronoun.

The syntax of Baule failed to fit into my neat universal framework, but I learned an extraordinary amount about the range of phenomena that "register on the radar" of human cognition and naturally also find their way into language. Other languages express these phenomena in other ways, or chose not to express them at all. However, that proto-semantic generalizations can be found to exist at all and which generalizations exist is both interesting and useful.

What does this have to do with search (the topic of this blog)? If proto-semantics is a reflex of human perception of the real world, we should expect that its influence impacts not only relatively low level syntactic processes, but also the more complex ways in which humans communicate and exchange information: information creation, curation and retrieval. If we can push forward this line of inquiry, a full answer to this question will surely be important enough to make its own splash.

Your mistrokes are costing me keystrokes

My mother insisted that I learn how to touch-type in high school and so I spent a summer after ninth grade or so pecking out the obligatory practice sequences.

At times I've caught myself being vain about my ability to take notes in lecture on my laptop and still make eye contact with the speaker. That's balanced by the many meetings in which I've taken minutes because it was uncomfortable to watch my colleagues engaged in seek and hit missions to input even simple sentences. And also by colleagues who are utterly unfazed by my scripting proficiency, but who light up when I am able to turn to smile as they walk in without breaking my stride in the e-mail I'm writing, "Hey, you can look at me and still type!"

Well, Google has found a way to keep me humble and to break down any remaining feelings of typing elitism. I type in a perfectly formed query, work meaning wired and Google finds it necessary to give me results for word meaning weird (check out the screen shot). My query is meant to find me the Wired article that I read in the UK edition on Thursday about a study that had been done at Duke about the meaning of work. I want to have another look at it so see if I can relate it to issues of worker engagement in crowdsourcing -- work that I currently collaborating with my colleagues on.

Evidently is what is happening is that the words "work" and "wired" are mistyped so frequently by searchers, especially in the context of the word "meaning", that the probably of me actually having meant to type work meaning wired is vanishingly small, or at least has fallen off the bottom of the Google charts.

I permit myself a half formulated cuss, well under my breath, and then I type in "work" meaning "wired".

OK. Well, my complaint about the wasted keystrokes may not be my only complaint: the extra apostrophes don't get me the article I want either.

But I do serendipitously stumble across a blog post urging scientist to move beyond papers and discuss the importance of their findings in blogposts: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/does-all-scientific-work-deserve-public-attention/ Hmm. So maybe I should be saying actually more why I want the paper about feelings of meaning at work and how it relates to what we are currently doing in the area of crowdsourcing. Our latest crowdsourcing paper:

Vliegendhart, R., Larson, M., Kofler, C., Eickhoff, C. and Pouwelse, J. Investigating Factors Influencing Crowdsourcing Tasks with High Imaginative Load Proceedings of CSDM 2011 (WSDM Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Search and Data Mining), 2011.

reports on a study whose results suggest that work quality is improved when workers are asked to provide explanations for the answers that they provide. In particular, they remain more engaged if they are required to provide an explanation for a personal preference that they have expressed. I would like to try to relate this to worker perceptions of meaning of the work.

In the end, I get up from behind the computer and walk the five meters to the chair where the hard copy of UK Wired was waiting and flipped quickly to the page, "At Duke University, when we have run experiments on feelings of "meaning" at work (tinyurl.com/4rwkg85)..." there it is.

One last go at Google, I find the article online by typing in the question asked in its final sentence, "How can we enhance the feeling of meaning in those around us?"

Maybe I'll start by being more patient with sloppy typists.

The Netbook Effect

"Give a laptop. Change the world." are the welcoming words of the website of One Laptop Per Child. A Wired article entitled "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" (Wired, March 2009) tells the story of how the low cost no-frills netbook evolved from the One Laptop Per Child initiative and predicts that netbooks will constitute 12% of the laptop market in 2010.
It sort of takes my breath away that I might actually live to see One Laptop Per Child happen. It gives me hope that we might eventually move not only as individuals, communities and countries, but as an entire species beyond subsistence level concerns.
At the same time, another part of my brain is formulating questions about what happens as an increasing proportion of personal machines are "thin" in the sense that they have low processing power and low storage capacity. The vision of democratizing the supply of services with high computational loads by distributing them over private citizens with unused processing capacity may have to be abandoned. Do we want to encourage a future in which we must rely on a distant center to store and swap our video content? Do we want to close the door on the possibility of internet content search that is supported by a million modest contributions of storage space and cpu cycles? Are we ready to give up our private capacities and allow resource rich hands to further accumulate a power monopoly removed beyond influence of the individual?

Kill your blog?

A "rant" I sent to Wired in reaction to "Kill your Blog" (Wired Nov 2008 p. 27). It didn't get published there--it seemed only fitting that it should land here in the blogosphere:

"How did we come to so completely repress our dissatisfaction with mainstream search engines? You point a finger at blogging and bloggers, but the issues you raise could also be laid at the doorstep of Google. Dare to imagine a search engine that lets our voices be heard within the intimate internet communities important to us, a search engine that distills for us the pith of our posts, keeping pace with publication. My rant passed your magic 140 character Twitter limit in my second sentence--shouldn't internet search technology be addressing the challenge of making my opinion heard anyway?"