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Phil Resnik's ACL keynote: A new balancing act

On July 5, Phil Resnik delivered a keynote address at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, with the title "A New Balancing Act: Reflections on the Relationship between Computational Linguistics and AI": In this talk I argued that the field of computational linguistics – a term that includes NLP as its […]

Iconic punctuation

Following up on our recent post about generational punctuation differences, here's a cartoon from the 7/27 New Yorker:    

“Symbolic precursors to writing” — a system of conventional signs — from the Paleolithic?

Below is a guest post by Richard Sproat and Rafael Núñez. It summarizes a recently published paper by d’Errico, Santos da Rosa, Courtenay,  Núñez,  Liu,  Sproat, & Blasi,  "Inferring Conventional Sign Systems from Paleolithic Engravings: Methodological and Theoretical Challenges". Back in February, Christian Bentz and Ewa Dutkiewicz (henceforth BD) published a paper in the Proceedings […]

Is generational punctuation still a thing?

Apparently so, though it's continuing to evolve. Reviewing Florence Hazrat's forthcoming book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, Judith Shulevitz focuses on the current generational and contextual differences in English punctuation ("Punctuation: A generational divide", The Atlantic 7/14/2026). There was a flurry of attention to such things a couple […]

Ask LLOG: Annoying words

This question arrived recently by email: A topic I wonder about: "annoying" words, and the cause of their annoyingness, and whether many people find the same particular words annoying, or if there's a long tail of very few or just one person who finds them annoying. The broad category is "workplace jargon", but not in […]

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