Now THAT's a search engine

One of SC's very favorite lines from Crocodile Dundee comes from when Paul Hogan's character is being mugged in New York, and has a knife pulled on him. He looks at it for a second, says, "that's not a knife", and then pulls out an enormous one in response and says, "now that's a knife".

It is in the same spirit that Semantic Compositions can only admire the new Linguist's Search Engine (hereafter, LSE), announced recently at Language Log by Philip Resnik.

The nonlinguist is probably wondering why linguists would want/need their own search engine, which provides an opportunity for SC to finally talk about what he does for a living, natural language processing. While SC has provided numerous examples of Google searches to check for attested uses of particular phrases, Google (or any other commercial search engine) can't do much to help with searching for particular grammatical structures. The LSE lets you do that. It also lets you expand queries with all of the meaning relations encoded in WordNet, which will come up whenever SC gets around to talking about ontologies, and not before. That last part has been done to some extent in other places, mostly as synonym searching, but SC cannot think of another publicly usable search engine which allows you to search on parse trees as well (note to folks funded on TIDES, AQUAINT, or other gov't. research projects -- yes, SC is well aware that the LSE is not the first piece of software to do some of these things; but it's the first that he has seen put out for the public to play with like this).

On an unrelated note, Semantic Compositions also owes thanks to The X-Bar and Thoughts, Arguments and Rants for flattering mentions. TAR is not strictly about linguistics, but it's going in the "Linguistics Blogs" section anyways, on account of having a lot about philosophy of language (and not of the Cracker Barrel variety, either). Those awaiting the introduction of the Cracker Barrel could greatly help Semantic Compositions by e-mailing or commenting with the specific line from The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax -- SC seems to have mislaid his copy at the moment.

Comments

[David Elworthy]

p125: "Since I wrote the 1978 review, we have witnessed a new flowering of methodological moaning and self-serving cracker-barrel philosophy of science in the work of people who actually do produce publishable work in descriptive and theoretical linguistics."

[Semantic Compositions]

THANK YOU! The first post in the category will go up tomorrow!