Comments on: What has technology done for words lately?

By: tonytam

tonytam — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:06:38 +0000

Hi Jesse, a lot of the benefits of normalization have gone out the window with virtually free disk space and different access patterns. So if you are constantly updating, say, the “partOfSpeech.name” attribute in a large set of documents (say you can’t decide between “noun” and “n.”), then normalization is great. But in heavy read-only scenarios, it’s often cheaper to incur the disk space hit of redundant data for fast access.

You could argue that normalization doesn’t work well in noSQL data storage logic level because there are no joins, which means more application logic or nested queries. But if you step back and look at something like a hierarchal data structure like a dictionary, it’s incredibly powerful to query inside a document.

By: Jesse Kochis

Jesse Kochis — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:39:07 +0000

Eric:

Having a partOfSpeech document makes more sense to me, but I am thinking about it from a RDBMS perspective. I don’t know how much of a concern normalization is with document storage systems like couch or mongo. I think there is a reason for data normalization outside of RDBMS, but I don’t know how NoSQL addresses it if at all That’s what I’m trying to learn.

By: Erin McKean

Erin McKean — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:26:13 +0000

Hi Jesse!

Your question is part of what we’re trying to answer with smartwords — what method makes more sense to you?

By: Jesse Kochis

Jesse Kochis — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:29:34 +0000

So I’m curious if you have a “noun” document that contains all properties of the noun part of speech, or do all definitions just have a partOfSpeech property, and you find all documents with the same value for that property?

By: Curt Knight

Curt Knight — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:59:17 +0000

I wonder what the long-term impact of the Internet will have on language. Will it make it more concise, with words that don’t mean anything being corrected with easier access to sites like this (I hate the word “conversating” for example), or will it make for more wide-spread use of slang and new words?

The Internet was supposed to make us more educated, but I’m afraid it’s making us dumber sometimes…

By: Mackenzie Kelly

Mackenzie Kelly — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:30:01 +0000

H L Mencken did a Three volume Dictionary of American Slang. You should incorporate it into your source material. I’m sure Blue balls will have a spot in his Dictionary. Taboo plays a big part of its makeup.
Mack Kelly

By: Patrina Cook

Patrina Cook — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:52:39 +0000

Interesting. I never though one could put so much thoughts on “technologizing” words

By: Heidi B

Heidi B — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:46:35 +0000

Interesting hearing the tech perspective on this. Cool approach….