Remember watching Arrival? – a linguist tasked with communicating with aliens learns their language lets her perceive time non-linearly, reshaping her understanding of reality. The plot brought the Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis back into mainstream about how language actively shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about. In the context of LLMs and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, the hypothesis becomes particularly relevant since the language of thought quite literally determines the quality of computational output....

I think it was around 1999 when I first heard that Urdu is a low resource language. 25 years later Urdu is still considered low-resource despite having over 70 million native speakers. This is because large manually curated linguistic resources required for training are still not available for Urdu. One way around this barrier is to translate existing corpora from a resource-rich language (cough English cough) to Urdu. This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem though since good automatic translation systems require training resources....

tl;dr I built a KWIC concordance of Iqbal’s Urdu Poetry - Check out iqbal.chaoticity.com ! In distributional semantics, just like in interpretation of law, a word is known by the company it keeps. Observing how a word appears in context of other words allows us to identify usage nuances and gain deeper insights into the meaning and connotations of that particular term. Traditional word indexes do not show this context and thus miss out on the most remarkable ability of the human brain – recognising patterns....

Roses are red Violets are blue Everyone’s equal When σ is μ