“We’re destroying words–scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.” […]
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great advantage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well–better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words–in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Ada?…”
George Orwell, 1984
Le 20 juin 2022 à 17:33, Ada Wan adawan919@gmail.com a écrit :
Hi Christopher,
It is of the best interest of the community to discontinue the usage of "word". The term is not only very shaky in its foundation (if any), but it can also effect disparity in performance in computational processing and robustness when human evaluation is involved. Despite the term has been casually adopted by many in the past, like many un-PC terms that may have an inappropriate undertone, it needs to be discouraged and abandoned. Last but not least, I noticed that you are located in Canada, in the event that you were to work with any indigenous communities, one MUST be advised to be careful with the usage of such term --- you could be imposing your own (EN- / FR- / dominant language-centric) view onto another individual/community. There is an element of cultural and linguistic hegemony with the usage of such term (including and not limited to making applications with it). Please also consult recent work in this area: https://openreview.net/forum?id=-llS6TiOew.
Feel free to get in touch if you should have any questions.
Best, Ada
On Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 4:53 PM Christopher Collins Christopher.Collins@ontariotechu.ca wrote: Hello,
I’m looking for any open source or cloud-hosted solution for complex word identification or word difficulty rating in French for a reading application.
As a backup plan we can use measures like corpus frequency, length, number of senses, but we’re hoping someone has already made a tool available.
We found this but that’s it: https://github.com/sheffieldnlp/cwi
Would appreciate any tips!
Thanks,
Chris
Christopher Collins [he/him] Associate Professor - Faculty of Science Canada Research Chair in Linguistic Information Visualization Ontario Tech University vialab.ca
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