June 23, 2014, by Graham Kendall

TheConversation: Love, peace and the plight of the air hostess: Google opens its brain to armchair linguists

“I downloaded a new keyboard onto my phone yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see it suggesting the word “to” after I had typed “going”. It “knew” that the phrase “going to” was a very common pair of words and managed to use this in order to speed up the message I was sending. The next word it suggested was “be”, and then “late”. While I was less pleased that to see my phone pre-diagnosing my punctuality problem, it had indeed correctly predicted the message I planned to send. This is a practical application of something called “corpus linguistics”. And now that the good people of Google …. ”

 

… so begins an article that Mike Groves recently has published in TheConversation.

Other Conversation articles that we have featured on this blog can be seen here.

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