Context is Everything with BYU's Famous Corpora

Context is Everything with BYU's Famous Corpora

Top of Mind with Julie Rose

Venezuela, Mercies in Disguise, Football and Brain Disease

Episode: Venezuela, Mercies in Disguise, Football and Brain Disease

  • Aug 10, 2017 11:00 pm
  • 14:28 mins

Guest: Mark Davies, PhD, Professor of Linguistics, BYU Ever had this problem? Try to type in “sorry I missed you” and your phone insists on autocorrecting it to “sorry I kissed you”? Why does autocorrect insist that “sorry I” should be followed by “kissed” instead of “missed” or any number of less embarrassing alternatives?  How do our phones and computers come up with words to suggest as we type? Through giant databases, or corpora of words, which catalogue how words most frequently appear in context. BYU linguistics professor Mark Davies has designed 21 such word databases, commonly used by tech companies, people learning English and even judges looking to see how past courts have interpreted certain phrases over time.