(Margarita) Good evening
I'm glad to introduce Adrianne Lahrar once again
as you probably know because
We've already been here
Few weeks ago. She is a relevant member of
the University of Arizona and
Also a member of the LEXVIN research group
as you know LEXVIN is a
research
Group based of the UNED and she'll be talking today about the plans
for the future of our research group and
I'm happy to give the floor to Adrianne Lahrar today here
(Adrianne) It's my pleasure to be here with Margarita again
and we are actually both talking about
Work that we've been doing for LEXVIN trying to integrate it to some extent so
I'll let Margarita start with her topics
(Margarita) First of all as you may know the general context where our research
is or can be
Placed is related to the representation of meaning for natural language
purposes for natural language
purposes and processing
Meanings, as you know are not grammaticalized or lexicalized or textually marked
But nevertheless they are transmitted and they affect the way we codify
meaning
These so called likely codified meanings have a lot to do with context
We can also say that they are context dependent
The arena where how our research takes place is in restricted lexicons such as wine-tasting
lexicons
the description of the wine-tasting
experiences can be found in
Tasting notes and in the beta databases were tasting notes are compiled
(Adrianne) I'd like to present some ideas for the future of LEXVIN some topics that I think would be very interesting
And the first one is
contrastive of analysis of wine vocabularies in the various languages and
Because there are members of LEXVIN who speak many languages and know other languages we have a tremendous amount of
resource
Material that we can draw on to see the way
Vocabularies of different languages map on to what we believe is probably the same kind of conceptual structure
a second topic that I want to introduce is the use of humor in wine
Language and this includes the use of wine names and winery names as well
a third topic that is
Fascinating is the empirical investigation of wine tasting what do tasters actually say about the way wine
looks
smells and tastes and
How do they evaluate these things and then finally are there any
Applications that can be made to the wine industries in a way that we might be useful
So let me just start with the first one a contrastive analysis
But before we begin with that we have to look at the different ways in which
People talk about wine and who is talking about wine
And what their goals are so there are at least three different groups
The first one would be the wine scientists, so these are the people like enologist
viticulturists and
The that's just call them experts and so presumably their
Vocabulary would in some ways be more restrictive something would use something more colorful words that say wine writers use
On the other hand they would probably use a lot more technical terms that maybe wine writers wouldn't use
The second group are the wine writers and what's interesting about these people
Is that they're not only interested in describing wines and making recommendations for
What to buy and where to get it and so forth, they're also interested in being good writers
And if say somebody who is working for a magazine like The Wine Spectator
has to analyze 60 wines from a recent vintage of a California
Cabernet Sauvignon
there's going to be a lot of similarity and using the same descriptors over and over and over again is pretty boring and
so the writers are looking into the resources of a vocabulary in order to make the writing more interesting and
then the third group is really the others and this would include merchants, advertiser
educators and of course those can be
Divided up into various other groups and each with its own
kinds of interests so
Margarita, do you have anything to say about that?
(Margarita) Well yes definitely I think that
The register that can be used in the use of humor is not to be found
in
particular
or specific
type of language
But in the way the different aspects that can be transmitted or the different pieces of information
somehow clash
among others
and that's one of the
Links that we have with descriptive algorithm that has been developed in LEXVIN
(Adrianne) One very interesting use of humor I think, it's a use of humor is
Parker Juniors definition of a decadent wine and
This is his definition if you're an ice cream and chocolate lover
you know the feeling of eating a huge sundae lavished with hot fudge and real whipped cream and
Rich vanilla ice cream if you're a wine enthusiast
A wine loaded with opulent even luxurious texture can be said to be decadent
Okay, now Parker obviously is a wine writer. I can't imagine a wine scientists using the word decadent or
Some of the other words the wine writers into I using and
this is an interesting example and
Maybe Margarita wants to say something about it with respect to why you can't get this out of a dictionary.
(Margarita) Yeah, definitely
One of the things that we do in the descriptive algorithm was to make and the different components of such
algorithm and
To contrast or to clash with each other and for example the dictionary definition of the word
decadent would certainly
fit
let's
Study a little bit more about Bernahrd Klem examples
(Adrianne) yes, Bernhard Klem wrote a book called Winespeak in which he collected thirty seven
Thousand words now
There's a lot of repetition so heavy very heavy too heavy not very heavy all get separate entries
But what's amusing is that you have a lot of images so presumably in his collection
wines have been described as
Reminding you or tasting like an angry octopus or smelling like
decayed
wombat or
the other one
Was a monkey riding a horse bareback
Now we can assume that very few people tasting a wine have had these experiences
and don't know what an angry octopus looks like or smells like or tastes like or a
Decayed wombat or any of the other things, so how do you make sense of these things I mean they're funny they they do
Provide you with a very vivid image so my
Explanation is that since they are rather negative
What the wine writer or the describer is saying is that this is a pretty awful wine
(Margarita) yeah, definitely
(Adrianne) By the way Kelm does have other images that are very positive like this wine was made by an angel something like that
(Margarita) Do we have that one? this wine
(Margarita) Other examples, so
(Adrianne) I don't think we have well
We have other examples
But they have to do more with the names of wines or wineries and you have things like
funky llama
herding cats burrowing owls screaming eagle and then some that are really puns like
South Africa the name of the wineries goat to Rome to make you think of coke de Rome
Cut ammonia they have a whole goat series like goats in the village they also have one called
Bordeaux and you have to see that spelled B O R E D
D O E so that
The female deer have been bored, and then there there other ones, too
there's a
new winery in Canada in British Columbia called Therapy, and then you have names like
Freudian Ship
(Margarita) Freudian Ship is fantatic as well
(Adrianne) Alfred Ego at the blend of four white wines and then there rosé a is called Pink Freud because
(Margarita) Pink Freud, that's great
(Adrianne) There's a lot of humor going on in the industry
and then another research area, which is really interesting is to do experiments and
When I started doing some of my work with the experiments
What I was looking for in my subjects I could give them wines and what I was looking for is do they agree that
Whatever wine it was I gave them to describe
Were they similar or were they not similar and one of the experiments that
Seemed to attract the most attention was the matching experiment and there are various versions of this but one version of the experiment
Has people working in pairs
All kinds of course were always sort of blind
so
one
Pair would get say
They have many pairs at the same wine but there would be three, let's say three red wines
They didn't taste different they were from different countries. They were made of different grapes and nobody ever said they tasted away
one person in the pair had
the three wines label say
A L Q the other person had the second wines
In a different order of course in the glasses
labeled say B
W Z or something like that and the task was to talk back and forth
To try to see which wines matched up
So that was one version the other one I didn't allow the pairs to talk back and forth
but one person in the pair would describe the wines and then have that description to the second person to match up and
What I found was that
Generally the matches were no better than chance the only
Exception was that I had access to some of the white experts at the University of
California Davis
Wine Institute and
There the matching was very good, but only on the California wines that they were very familiar with
if they were graduate students who actually
Tested on their ability to identify wines and describe them their way in there they were supposed to taste
And when I gave them
Unexpected wines actually they didn't do any better than the non experts now
they knew a lot, so they would be able to learn very very quickly and
I was kind of working on my own but
Because this experiment caught the attention of other
people in the field
others
with
Access to a laboratory so they could test the wines better more subjects more sophisticated
statistics and experimental methods
replicated the experiments or
Added some other ones and their results were either the sames
Similar or compatible with my own so I felt very good about those results
(Margarita) So
We're going to discuss
today
an example of
lightly codified meanings and particularly
about the use of humor as a
Something that cannot be codified in
traditional
morphosyntactic
Notations
Would like to say something we've been discussing recently
Adrianne Lehrer and myself about a picture that they
Had the chance to see at the Prado Museum in Madrid and it was a picture by Sánchez Cotán
Who is a
17th century
painter
very
Spanish one
and he
featured
a bearded woman
holding a baby and breastfeeding him and
she was
an amazing picture because
the face is like
the face of a man with a long beard, and then there's the baby and that's the
the breast that's
the baby's been fed with and
It's such a shock
That you received that you can hope with love it
So it's it's it's a very humorous sort of picture
Because there's a number of items that are clashing with each other the most
Obvious thing that's clashing is or that produces a clash is the fact that the prototypical
feature or one of the most prototypical features of
Men as a category
Is that men used to have beards
But they don't they don't have
Feeding breasts they can have breasts but not feeding ones and that particular image is the image of
Nobody could say whether it was a prototypical woman or a prototypical man
Because the picture is featuring both prototypical features at the same time
because one of the most prototypical features of a
Woman obviously is to breast feed a child somehow
So there's the breast there's a baby
and then there's a beard and then there's the
masculine looking face of that man, so
The result is particularly humorous in the sense that
Lots of elements are clashing among others so that takes us back to the descriptive algorithm were one of the
Most characteristic procedures that we use when we use that algorithm is to make
components clash among others, so
Going back to the dictionary definition the dictionary definition would be the pattern of our lexical entry
towards which other descriptions can either match or clash
one of the two so the example of the Sánchez Cotán picture and how
It raises some
some kind of
Humorous reaction is somehow a simile of
Descriptive algorithm procedures that we use that we are developing
Statistically
And then here we are we're finished and you can find
The bibliography that
Somehow
Represents some of our publications as a group. And particularly some of
Adrianne's most important publications and
There will be a link in
in the aLF
Platforms and for those of you who would like to contact us
You have in the webpage our email address. Thank you very much
(Adrianne) Thank you