Alex around the World

Remember my last post about me dreaming about the new MacBook Pro? It contained a word (in fact 2) that may seem a bit strange to some readers. I thought it could be a good idea to describe it in more details, specially since Wikipedia has a quite complete entry for this concept:

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics. Computational linguists were formerly usually computer scientists who had specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Recent research has shown that language is much more complex than previously thought, so computational linguistics work teams are now sometimes interdisciplinary, including linguists (specifically trained in linguistics). Computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists and logicians, amongst others.

This week’s word I have selected is mnemonic or mnemonic techniques. Read my related post or what Wikipedia says about it:

Mnemonics are often verbal, something such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something. They are often used to remember lists. Mnemonics rely not only on repetition to remember facts, but also on associations between easy-to-remember constructs and lists of data, based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers data attached to spatial, personal or otherwise meaningful information than that occurring in meaningless sequences. The sequences must make sense though. If a random mnemonic is made up, it is not necessarily a memory aid.

Content management systems are behind more and more corporate websites. It does certainly help manage thousands of gigabytes of content, but we are also more aware of the limitations of some systems. Here’s the weekly definition from wikipedia:

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. A content management system is frequently a web application used for managing websites and web content, though in many cases, content management systems require special client software for editing and constructing articles. The market for content management systems remains fragmented, with many open-source and proprietary solutions available.

Read also my discussion about workflows.

Here’s the word of the week: multilingualism, courtesy of Wikipedia community:

A multilingual person is, in the broadest definition of multilingualism, anyone with communicative skills in more than one language, be it active or passive. More specifically, the terms bilingual and trilingual are used to describe comparable situations in which two or three languages are involved.

See also: Linguistic diversity on the Internet.