Language and Music

Language and Music

  • Subtitling Software Today

    For the amateur and professional subtitlers of today, there is no shortage of subtitling software to choose from. From free to paid, cloud-based to downloadable, there is something for every type of subtitler. This article will serve as a summary of many of the options available, examining the advantages and disadvantages of each. Free Software…

  • What is BabelNet?

    BabelNet is an multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary, which features open data and was created by the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at the Sapienza University of Rome. BabelNet is an ontology, defined using BabelNet as “a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their…

  • SKELL Presentation

    My presentation for this module is an introduction to using SKELL (Sketch Education for Language Learning). The presentation will cover several areas, including a brief introduction to SKELL itself, the languages available and its three main features of examples, word sketch and similar words. The presentation will also outline some key points to remember in…

  • What is a wordnet?

    A wordnet is a lexical database of a language that links words according to their semantic relations. The Princeton WordNet was the very first wordnet to be developed, and is frequently the model used to develop subsequent wordnets, in English and other languages. Other wordnets include: The unit of analysis in a wordnet is the…

  • What are semantic relations?

    Semantic relations are the ways that words are connected to other words. There are many different types of semantic relations, some of which are explained here: We can see example of each of these relations below: We can investigate the semantic relations between words using a wordnet, which we will explore in the next post.

  • What is a collocation?

    When learning a second language, you may come across the puzzling term “collocation”. Cambridge English Dictionary defines a collocation as “a word or phrase that is often used with another word or phrase, in a way that sounds correct to people who have spoken the language all their lives, but might not be expected from…

  • What is Sketch Engine?

    Sketch Engine, according to its website, is “the ultimate tool to explore how language works”.  Essentially, it is an online tool which allows you to analyse language and boasts 700 corpora in over a hundred languages.  With Sketch Engine, you can investigate language at the level of words, phrases or whole texts. In terms of…

  • What is a corpus?

    If you study languages and linguistics, it’s very likely that you’ll come across the word corpus. A corpus (plural corpora) is “a collection of written or spoken material stored on a computer and used to find out how language is used”, and can be used in academic fields like corpus linguistics. There are several different…

  • What is a lemma?

    Lemma is a word that I first heard in a lexicography class during my year abroad and, ironically, I didn’t know what it meant and had to look it up. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a lemma is “a form of a word that appears as an entry in a dictionary and is used…

  • The Origin of Language and Language as a Communication Technology

    One of the great questions in life, which, paradoxically, the majority of people never think about, is this: where did human language come from? Over the years, many different theories have been proposed, including the idea that language was a gift from the divine (“Experience to Imagination” 107); however, without a time machine to take…