"Good afternoon everyone. Tea is now served
in the kitchen. Have a great weekend."
Every day at 3 in the afternoon,
the scientists and staff at SFI meet for
tea time! This is a time to get together
for a break, have some delicious snacks,
and chat informally with whoever happens
to be around. Tea time has been an essential
part of SFI's culture since its founding.
And the promise of food and conversation
manages to get everyone out of their
offices and into the institute's large
kitchen for a needed afternoon break.
"Are you a St. John's person?"
"Graduate, yes."
"Oh. Now you're working here?"
"Yeah."
"Are you working with Simon?"
"Sometimes, yes."
Simon: "On occasion!"
"I think it would fit in beautifully
you know, next time around."
"Mhm. Okay. Well we should talk."
"I would really encourage. I'd be glad to
give you any number of examples, ways in
and so forth." "Okay."
This is Sarah, who I've just met here at
tea time today. "Hello." Sarah, can you
tell us how you are and what you're doing
here at SFI?
Sarah: Sure, my name is Sarah Klingenstein
and I am a graduate fellow. I graduated
last fall with a Masters in Eastern Classics
from St. John's College in Santa Fe and
previous to that, I studied linguistics,
also at the graduate level, at the University
of Colorado, Boulder.
"What brought you to Santa Fe?"
Sarah: Well it's kind of funny actually.
When I was in college, my first job was
as a research associate and it was this
project for the Cave, which is this
immersive environment and so I was doing
a lot of the background research. And
all the interesting...I was 18... all the
interesting stuff that I was coming across
came out of the Santa Fe Institute and so
the first time I came to visit Santa Fe,
I wanted to come to the Santa Fe Institute
and it just wasn't exactly a tourist site
so it didn't work, but uhm, so then
a couple years ago, when I started at St. John's,
there was a posting for a graduate intern
at the Santa Fe Institute and I can
honestly say that it was a childhood dream
of mine to work at the Santa Fe Institute.
"So what are you doing here?"
Sarah: Uhm a lot of my work is computational
linguistics. It's funny, it's at the uhm
infrequently explored intersection between
computational linguistics, British legal
history, and information theory.
"Oh wow!" laughter
Sarah: And in a broad sense, what we are
trying to do is come up with a sophisticated
way to...uh...kind of quantify changes in
uhm...in semantics over time. And linking
that to institutional change.
"In this course, we covered some of
Shannon information theory and uhm, basically
found that it doesn't really have a lot
to say about semantics. "Right."
So I'm wondering how you're using it in
your work on semantics.
Sarah: "Well, what we've had to do is
come up with a way to course-grain the
English language, and so we've actually
borrowed the structure that Roget used
when he first made his thesaurus.
What he initially did wasn't just making
synonym sets, he also built this whole nested
semantic structure of the English language.
At the very top, there are 6 categories
and all of English fits into these six
categories. What that has done is kind of
provide us with a ready-made...uhm...
nested, semantic classification system.
And so what that allows us to do is
course-grain the semantics of English
into these categories. And so
we've been treating them like probability
distributions, and so in that way...
"You can do the kind of...Shannon entropy."
Sarah: Exactly, yeah.
"Okay, well thanks a lot Sarah, very interesting."
Sarah: It was nice to meet you.
"And nice to meet you."
Inaudible conversation