In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a "word" may be learned as part of learning the writing system.[5] This is the case for the English language, and for most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets. In English orthography, the letter sequences "rock", "god", "write", "with", "the", and "not" are considered to be single-morpheme words, whereas "rocks", "ungodliness", "typewriter", and "cannot" are words composed of two or more morphemes ("rock"+"s", "un"+"god"+"li"+"ness", "type"+"writ"+"er", and "can"+"not").
In languages with a literary tradition, the question of what is considered a single word is influenced by orthography. Word separators, typically spaces and punctuation marks are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are a relatively modern development in the history of writing. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. For example, ice cream, air raid shelter and get up each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of get), and so is no one, but the similarly compounded someone and nobody are considered single words.
Sometimes, languages which are close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. se laver ("to wash oneself"), whereas in Portuguese they are hyphenated, e.g. lavar-se, and in Spanish they are joined, e.g. lavarse.[a]
In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may inflect to have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes.
Philosophers have found words to be objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas", though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea".[16] Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."[17]
In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of suffixes taken by the word. Some words can be controversial, such as slang in formal contexts; misnomers, due to them not meaning what they would imply; or polysemous words, due to the potential confusion between their various senses.[20]
The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several improvements that make the Skip-gram model more expressive and enable it to learn higher quality vectors more rapidly. We show that by subsampling frequent words we obtain significant speedup, and also learn higher quality representations as measured by our tasks. We also introduce Negative Sampling, a simplified variant of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) that learns more accurate vectors for frequent words compared to the hierarchical softmax. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of Canada'' and "Air'' cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada''. Motivated by this example, we present a simple and efficient method for finding phrases, and show that their vector representations can be accurately learned by the Skip-gram model. "
This document is intended to provide guidance for authors, editors, presenters, media spokespersons, and other content contributors; it is not intended to be prescriptive, exhaustive, or used as a single authoritative source for specific terminology. Every effort should be made to determine what is most appropriate for the topic, type, and purpose of the communication. However, there will be variations in how individuals self-identify and prefer to be referenced. Individuals within groups may have different preferences, and preferences may also change over time. Inclusive, anti-biased language honors the rights of groups and individuals to define their own identities. Content creators should consider the target audience when choosing language and framing and should consult with individuals/groups to ask how they wish to be identified. This may include consulting reliable self-advocacy groups and/or resources developed by organizations representing the communities being discussed. Despite thoughtful consideration, the most carefully chosen words may have an unintended (and negative) impact, depending on the connotation to the audience. However, using anti-biased, inclusive language will help clarify the intent, hopefully mitigating negative impacts.
The AAP recognizes that dialogue about terminology is ongoing and there often is not universal agreement about specific terms and their definitions. Vocabulary continually evolves. This is a working document that will be continuously updated as recommendations for suggested terminology evolve. The AAP encourages content creators to practice cultural humility and engage in ongoing dialogue and learning to increase their understanding of inclusive, anti-biased terminology. Using cultural humility can help people reflect when their words have an impact other than what was intended and allow language to continually evolve as we learn more.
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