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Posts Tagged ‘large language model’

But What If AI Saves Dying Languages?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2026| 2 Comments »

Photo: Richard Ellis/Alamy.
Copies of the Gullah-language Bible, De Nyew Testament. I once had a Bible collection that included this one. Some experts say artificial intelligence will help save endangered languages like Gullah Geechee.

For many reasons, including the fact that artificial intelligence “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton has said AI could wipe out humanity in three decades, I am not a fan. I know it can be helpful in medicine and other things I care about, but three decades is scary.

But what if AI saves dying languages?

Jonathan Abrams wrote recently at the New York Times about people using AI as a tool to do just that.

“While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre.

“Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.

“ ‘I love Dua Lipa,’ said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. ‘Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region.’ …

“Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered. …

“In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews.

“Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age.

“ ‘It’s scary how fast all this happened,’ Caffery said. ‘I don’t even think I knew a large-language model existed two years ago.’ …

“The efforts are part of inroads to preserve dialects at risk of being lost, and bridge a disconnect between large-language model machines, while maintaining a community’s ability to control and own its digital destiny.

“In the United States, questions exist over how to preserve languages like Louisiana French, the Gullah Geechee language (the English-based Creole language of some coastal regions in the Atlantic southeast) and Appalachian English in the modern, digital age.

“Globally, researchers at the University of Edinburgh are using artificial intelligence to strengthen and revive Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Google recently announced the availability of voice recordings of nearly 30 sub-Saharan African languages to help build tools like voice assistants and translation apps. …

“The importance of accurate speech recognition becomes greater as important tasks like job hiring and medical transcriptions become more automated and digitized, [Christine Mallinson, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County] said. …

” ‘There’s accents, patterns of grammar, word choice. Those differences are connected to our families, our neighborhoods, our age and gender and racial and ethnic and cultural backgrounds and where we grew up.’ …

“For centuries, Louisiana French was the predominant language spoken in South Louisiana. In 1921, a new state constitution declared English the primary language. Many parents stopped teaching their children the language out of fear of discrimination, as students who spoke Louisiana French in class were often punished with knuckle-rappings.

“A reversal came in 1968 when the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana was created to advance French, largely through education and community initiatives. In 2023, the Advocate of Baton Rouge estimated about 120,000 Louisianans still spoke French.

“Caffery grew up in Franklin, La., an antebellum town on Bayou Teche. As a child, he ate Cajun and Creole food. His grandparents sometimes sang Old French songs and passed along phrases in the language.

“ ‘Whether you spoke it or speak it, the language is floating in the air,’ he said. ‘There’s this feeling of there is this beautiful thing that we want to hang on to.’ …

“The Center of Louisiana Studies houses a vast trove of Cajun and Creole folklore recordings that include over 12,000 hours of oral histories, field recordings and music performances recorded on everything from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. …

“The language is almost entirely preserved in vocal recordings. ‘A lot of it is sung in the language, and it’s something that’s vanishing,’ Caffery said. ‘Just in the same way you’d want food that’s local to your region, it’s important to have culture that is local to the region that makes you feel rooted and certain.’ ”

More at the Times, here,

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Popular AI Words to Watch For

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 12, 2024| 12 Comments »

Image: CNN.
When you see phrases like “intricate interplay,” a concept I illustrate with this CNN image, suspect AI. There are lots of other common usages to be alert to.

Hello, Word People. That is, People Who Are Fascinated by Words. When you do online searches in the future, will you know what words and phrases may indicate AI behind the scenes? Kyle Orlando has some answers at Ars Technica.

“Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model [LLM]. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which ‘excess words’ started showing up much more frequently during the LLM era (i.e., 2023 and 2024). The results ‘suggest that at least 10 percent of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs,’ according to the researchers.

“In a preprint paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany’s University of Tübingen and Northwestern University said they were inspired by studies that measured the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic by looking at excess deaths compared to the recent past. By taking a similar look at ‘excess word usage’ after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that ‘the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words’ that was ‘unprecedented in both quality and quantity.’

“To measure these vocabulary changes, the researchers analyzed 14 million paper abstracts published on PubMed between 2010 and 2024, tracking the relative frequency of each word as it appeared across each year. They then compared the expected frequency of those words (based on the pre-2023 trend line) to the actual frequency of those words in abstracts from 2023 and 2024, when LLMs were in widespread use.

“The results found a number of words that were extremely uncommon in these scientific abstracts before 2023 that suddenly surged in popularity after LLMs were introduced. The word ‘delves,’ for instance, shows up in 25 times as many 2024 papers as the pre-LLM trend would expect; words like ‘showcasing’ and ‘underscores’ increased in usage by nine times as well. Other previously common words became notably more common in post-LLM abstracts: The frequency of ‘potential’ increased by 4.1 percentage points, ‘findings’ by 2.7 percentage points, and ‘crucial’ by 2.6 percentage points, for instance.

These kinds of changes in word use could happen independently of LLM usage, of course — the natural evolution of language means words sometimes go in and out of style.

“However, the researchers found that, in the pre-LLM era, such massive and sudden year-over-year increases were only seen for words related to major world health events. …

“In the post-LLM period, though, the researchers found hundreds of words with sudden, pronounced increases in scientific usage that had no common link to world events. … The words with a post-LLM frequency bump were overwhelmingly ‘style words’ like verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (a small sampling: ‘across, additionally, comprehensive, crucial, enhancing, exhibited, insights, notably, particularly, within’). …

“The pre-2023 set of abstracts acts as its own effective control group to show how vocabulary choice has changed overall in the post-LLM era.

“By highlighting hundreds of so-called ‘marker words’ that became significantly more common in the post-LLM era, the telltale signs of LLM use can sometimes be easy to pick out. Take this example abstract line called out by the researchers, with the marker words highlighted: ‘A comprehensive grasp of the intricate interplay between […] and […] is pivotal for effective therapeutic strategies.’

“After doing some statistical measures of marker word appearance across individual papers, the researchers estimate that at least 10 percent of the post-2022 papers in the PubMed corpus were written with at least some LLM assistance. The number could be even higher, the researchers say, because their set could be missing LLM-assisted abstracts that don’t include any of the marker words they identified. …

“Papers authored in countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan showed LLM marker words 15 percent of the time, suggesting ‘LLMs might … help non-natives with editing English texts, which could justify their extensive use.’ On the other hand, the researchers offer that native English speakers ‘may [just] be better at noticing and actively removing unnatural style words from LLM outputs,’ thus hiding their LLM usage from this kind of analysis.”

More at Ars Technica via Wired, here.

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