Links - S13 Language and Computers

Overview Day

Look at the L&C course from Fall 2012 to see what was covered then and grab some of the resources.
Check out the webpage for the course on lego robots at Saarland University. See videos of the lego robot bartender we saw in class.
Create cool word clouds with Wordle

Browse the world of writing systems at Omniglot.
Get to know the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Language Log explains what is great about Hangul.
Read about the Tengwar writing system Tolkein devised for languages of Middle Earth.
Check out the Hanzi Smatter blog to see why you should know your Chinese before getting tattoos with Chinese characters.

Spam and anti-spam: What Nigeria spam is and how people have tricked the tricksters
The infinite monkey theorem and monkeys typing made concrete.
Scientific American: Stopping Spam, by Joshua Goodman, David Heckerman and Robert Rounthwaite.

Talk to ELIZA.
Talk to A.L.I.C.E.
Talk to Jabberwacky chatbots.
Jabberwacky chats with A.L.I.C.E – quite amusing!
Terry Winograd's page about the SHRDLU system.
Watch the Saturday Night Live skit about a blind date with a dialog system.
A big list of links related to dialog systems.
The COMIC project: Conversational Multimodal Interaction with Computers.
The CoSy project: dialog systems and cognitive architectures for robots.
Check out the webpage for the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT media lab.
The WITAS project: multi-modal conversational interfaces (including autonomous (simulated) helicopter).
The NICE project: dialog system for edutainment.
Wikipedia: the Chinese room.
Terry Brisson's meaty reply to the Chinese room.
Radiolab episode on emergence.
Wikipedia: emergence.
Wikipedia: homunculus.

Wikipedia: Cryptography Portal.
Wikipedia: the Vigenere cipher.
The Code Book website.
The cipher of Mary Queen of Scots.
Wikipedia: the Enigma machine used by the Germans in WWII.
Wikipedia: The Navajo code talkers who provided secure communication for the USA during WWII.
Wikipedia: The Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Wikipedia: the Voynich manuscript.
Check out this interesting new theory about the Voynich manuscript.
Wikipedia: Zipf's law.

Try out Google's online machine translation system.
Have a Translation Party: put an English phrase in and then it gets translated back-and-forth between English and Japanese until it reaches equilibrium.
Watch a video of a story which was written in English, translated to French, then to German, then back to French, then back to English: A Wicked Deception.

The Suicide Machine systematically removes you from the social network of your choice.

The Urban Dictionary has a lot of great new words, or new meanings for old words. Great for multislacking!

It can be difficult to say no to a robot... (warning: explicit language) Or, to put it differently: Today's speech recognition systems get in trouble when the utterance is short.

Would you like to have captions for your telephone? Warning: a human operator is in the loop…

Check out how rise and fall in the news media (mainstream press and blogs) over time with MemeTracker.

Crowdsourcing example: Phrase Detectives is a game in which the user annotates corpora while playing, the project description can be found here.

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