Foreign Language Grammatical Errors as a Native Language Identifier

Sounds like the title of an impressive paper to be submitted to some Linguistics conference.

Actually it's just the best way to describe an interesting thought I stumbled upon. I'm reading through a number of papers for my research and the authors come from many different cultures. There are a vast number of European researchers in my chosen area of expertise, and many papers come out of Germany, Switzerland, and France. A large number of papers also come from various Asian sources or authors. As I was reading through a paper titled "Content-Based Retrieval of MP3 Music Objects" I was getting the nagging suspicion that the author was Asian and learned English as a second language based solely on the "speech" pattern and the consistent type of grammatical errors being made. I checked, and sure enough, the authors are Chih-Chin Liu and Po-Jun Tsai from Taiwan.

For examples of what I'm talking about, take these sentences:

'This is because in this time interval, the note corresponding to the word "empty" becomes very loudly and its pitch falls into these two subbands.'

'Approximately matching ability is strongly required in a multimedia database system.'

'These structural audio information can be used to support content-based retrieval.'

I'm not picking on anyone here, it's just an observation that I found interesting. Coming from specific native languages will cause a greater likelihood of specific types of mistakes in foreign language. I would hope this interesting phenomenon has been studied before, perhaps Katya can enlighten us further on the matter.

Right out of a scary movie

I woke up this morning at 7:15, as I usually do. I tend to have difficulty actually waking up, so I hopped on my computer and checked out the deal websites and the news. The reading usually prompts my brain to start working. At about 7:25 I went downstairs to take a shower. As I flipped the switch to turn on the light in the bathroom I got a small shock from the accumulated static generated by my slippers. At that moment I hear the sounds of the 20 Questions ball sitting on the shelf around the corner in the living room. Perplexed I walk in and find it turning on asking me if I want to play. I press "No" but nothing happens, so I pressing each of the other non-yes buttons, to no avail. So I press "Yes" and it begins with the question asking. Rather creepy. So I started answering the questions somewhat randomly, nothing particularly in mind. I'm mostly just hoping that when I finish it won't respond with something like, "I'm right behind you." or "Isn't it a good day to die?". After responding to question 20 it tells me that I'm thinking of a Magic 8 Ball. Fine, whatever. I put it back on the shelf and took my shower. As of yet there have been no further mysterious occurrences today.

Is GMail trying to send me a message?

Here's the ad I got on my GMail account this morning:




Is Google saying I should get married, or that it thinks I need a wedding dress?

Life is....

Life is very surprising sometimes. This weekend for example. Never in a million years would I have anticipated the events of this past weekend. Very unusual, but in the end everything turned out quite nicely. I guess it just goes to show that just because you have an idea in your head about what your life is going to be, doesn't mean that that idea is going to have any bearing on what your life really becomes. And no, you don't get to know any more information about what happened this past weekend, not at the moment anyways.

Anywho, Life and I are on good terms again.

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And a big congratulations to all of us at The Board, we managed to post 100 questions/comments today. I'm fairly certain that this is a new Board record. And upon looking at the inbox, I've decided that we need more writers. We're getting swamped.