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Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

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Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#121

Post by globular-toast »

voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

Yep, all of the following make perfect sense to me, they're just non-idiomatic:

- Don't put your hand in water that's boiling,

- Add the pasta to water that's boiling,

- That saucepan is full of water that's boiling.

If "boiling water" were a distinct word, all of these sentences would change meaning compare to their idiomatic counterparts.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#122

Post by zozbot234 »

Shorel wrote: post #116

As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations." To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach. I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did! (Before an…

AIUI, collocations are just "words that often go together". It doesn't signal any unconventional meaning to the construction, that would make it a proper idiom.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#123

Post by georgefrowny »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #91
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water. in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?

> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water . I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling. I can see why some…

Yes, and substitution of boiled for boiling water has produced many terrible cups of tea.

It depends on the tea, but some cannot be well made with a metal pot of water that's taken a few minutes to get from the kettle to the table.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#124

Post by exmadscientist »

michaeld123 wrote: post #61
thmpp wrote: post #32

While 'this analysis would not have been possible without LLM', I am not sure the LLM analysis was well reviewed after it has been done. From the obscure/familiar word list, some of the n-grams, e.g. "is resource", "seq size", "db xref" surely happen in the wild (we well know), but I would doubt that we can argue they are missing from the dictionary. Knowing the realm, I would argue none of them are words, not even c…

The very bottom of the slider is there to illustrate where LLM artifacts and Wiktionary noise live — it's not presented as legitimate vocabulary. The slider lets you see the full quality gradient, including where it breaks down.

That's not really mentioned in the article, though. As far as the article is concerned, the right side of that slider is valid-but-possibly-too-rare-to-be-interesting, when in fact it's just garbage. This does not sell the concept well.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#125

Post by ben_w »

kdheiwns wrote: post #119
voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional…

> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless.

May I introduce you to the German language?

We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation Company Captain) and "[Das] Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" ([the] cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law).

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#126

Post by Shorel »

zozbot234 wrote: post #122
Shorel wrote: post #116

As far as my limited knowledge of linguistics goes, the technical term is actually "collocations." To me, any discussion of this topic that doesn't mention collocations signals an amateurish approach. I also disagree with the premise that "this was not possible before LLM." That's nonsense. Linguists created many dictionaries of collocations for different languages, so that work is precisely what they did! (Before an…

AIUI, collocations are just "words that often go together". It doesn't signal any unconventional meaning to the construction, that would make it a proper idiom.

If that were the case, there would be no need for collocation dictionaries :)

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#127

Post by harperlee »

Surprised that no comment mentioned that there is a standard term (not a word :P) for the set of words that denominates a particular concept: nominal syntagm. Such as "boiling water" and also "that green parrot we saw yesterday over the left branch".

Also the slider examples are abysmal. "I love you", "Go home" and "How are you" are not words by any stretch of imagination. For someone who makes word games, I don't see a particularly deep love of words here.

Edit: Obligatory reference to Borges's Tlön: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#128

Post by account42 »

ben_w wrote: post #125
kdheiwns wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if "boiling water" is one word, what about boiling sugar? Boiling milk? Boiling volcano? Boiling soup? Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. Some of them on the list, like black hole, do make sense. That's a very distinct thing. It's not a hole in the conventional…

> Adding two words together creates a new and different concept. The permutations necessary to represent every concept ever formed by combining two or more different words would be endless. May I introduce you to the German language? We have "gesundheitszeugnis" (health certificate) and "bärenstark" (strong as a bear), and of course "[der] Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän" ([the] Danube Steamship Navigation…

And we don't expect dictionaries to contain every compound word you could come up with in German either.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#129

Post by georgefrowny »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #26

The name for these are "collocations". Collocation dictionaries are lists of collocations. The reason they're absent from single word dictionaries is because there's about 25x more collocations than single words.

And fittingly enough, "collocation dictionary" is not in "the" dictionary. At least not the OED.

Presumably if the word thesaurus was actually "synonym dictionary" it would likewise be absent.

Re: Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

#130

Post by globular-toast »

5o1ecist wrote: post #108
voidUpdate wrote: post #103

> “Boiling water” isn’t “water that happens to be boiling.” It’s a hazard, a cooking stage, a state of matter I guess we'll have to disagree then, because "boiling water" is "water that's boiling" to me. It's not a different state of matter to "water", that would be "steam". It being a hazard doesn't mean it's a singular concept, same as "wet floor"

[flagged]

Yeah, but the nice thing about natural language is, it doesn't matter what you think. People talk because they want to communicate something. You can try to talk your pet language at other people, but you will fail at communicating. So things have a happy way of sorting themselves out.
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