EXTRACTING MEANING FROM WORDS
It’s in the papers — but a computer to read them will help
Words matter. I don’t just say that because I get paid by the word and live in hope that if I produce enough of them they will form a water-tight catamaran in the Bahamas for me to retire to. Words matter because they show us who we are. Just ask the authors of a new paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These UK researchers examined all the words printed in more than 35.9-million British newspaper articles between 1800 and 1950. That’s 28.6-billion words. For some context, the average adult reads about 200 words a minute, so it would take 272 years of nonstop reading for a human to read all 28.6-billion of them. An impossible task for a person, but not for a computer. The researchers’ goal was simple: to use artificial intelligence to comb through large tracts of data and extract meaning about British culture and history. A previous study had compared the language of 5-million books (written in English) published over 200 years, but books ...
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