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George Fredrik Smith

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Author: gfsmith

Quick Tips for Learning Vocabulary in a Second Language

Posted 3 years ago by gfsmith

  It goes without saying that learning a new vocabulary is an important step in mastering a second language. After all, without words, we wouldn’t be able to understand or

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English News Radio for Language Learning: An Analysis of NPR’s All Things Considered

Posted 3 years ago by gfsmith

Introduction A key goal of many English language learners is to reach a point where they are able to effortlessly understand spoken media – television, radio, YouTube videos, etc. This

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Do you know Brian-ese? Applying NLP and text analysis to one year of the Brian Lehrer show.

Posted 4 years ago by gfsmith

Preamble: This article features language mined from transcripts of “The Brian Lehrer Show”, publicly available at https://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl. This information is being shared and discussed purely for entertainment purposes!   “It’s the

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Heroes vs. Villains: Two more case studies

Posted 4 years ago by gfsmith

Do other Disney villains and heroes use similarly sophisticated language? Last week, I published a post comparing the lexical sophistication of Aladdin and Jafar’s word use in the classic Disney

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Scraping the web: The MIT OpenCourseware corpus of academic spoken English

Posted 4 years ago by gfsmith

Introduction In the pre-computer era, the creation of language corpora – compilations of millions of words drawn from multiple sources – was a painstaking and laborious undertaking. Imagine researchers huddled

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Heroes vs. Villains: An NLP case study of lexical sophistication in Aladdin

Posted 4 years ago by gfsmith

Do Disney villains really use more sophisticated language than the heroes? Who among us hasn’t noticed that the villains of popular Disney films tend to carry themselves with a certain

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