横幅图片:一个女人成功地赢得了一场世界游戏. (资料来源:Glenn Asakawa) 

由Josh Wardle创作, the game Wordle went public in October 2021 和 has since skyrocketed in popularity 和 启发了许多分支. 其实非常简单:每一天, players have six attempts to guess a r和omly generated five-letter word. 

This free online word puzzle became so 好吧-known over the winter that it was recently purchased by 《博彩app推荐》 Company, 引发了一阵争论. Would the game become more difficult, or would you have to pay to play? 

亚历克西斯·帕尔默, assistant professor of linguistics at CU Boulder, is a self-described word game aficionado. 她也是一名计算语言学家, a subfield of artificial intelligence that sits at the intersection of linguistics 和 计算机科学. 今天的科罗拉多大学 spoke with Palmer to learn more about the Wordle phenomenon.

五个字母有什么特别的?

五个字母的单词很有趣. 它们在英语中通常只有一个音节, 和 usually they start with consonants 和 their vowels l和 somewhere in the middle. Another common structure for five-letter words is alternating consonants 和 vowels. These are constraints that we know innately 和 we use that knowledge whether we realize it or not. 这是研究语言学的一个有趣的窗口, 因为当你解这个的时候, 你像, 好吧, 我知道什么字母可以去那里. 我怎么知道的? 

那么，《博彩平台推荐》就像是在用博彩平台推荐自己的大脑玩游戏吗?

Wordle appeals to our intuitive knowledge of what words can look like in English. Not only what words are in our vocabulary, but what words are possible. There's a huge amount of knowledge about valid word structures 和 patterns of sound that we have on a subconscious level as speakers of our native language. 即使博彩平台推荐不能写下规则, we know you can't start a word with the sequence “ng” in English, 那是不可能发生的. This is a lot of what linguistics is: trying to codify those rules 和 figure out what our knowledge as a native speaker is. 

在世界锦标赛中获胜有什么策略吗? 

There are a lot of strategies that are just based on the frequency of letters in English. This also shows up in Wheel of Fortune where the game starts contestants off with a certain set of letters—R, S, T, L, N 和 E—because those are the most frequently occurring letters in English. A lot of the words that have been proposed as good starting words are some combination of those.

With Wordle, I actually first started with a strategy of trying to figure out what my vowels are. 我用一个开头词“LOUIE”.“根据我今天早上读到的东西, 这是一个糟糕的策略, 但我也还没输, 要么. 当然, 从计算的角度来看, you could also just write an algorithm to solve Wordle puzzles, 但这有什么好玩的?

世界是如何工作的?

后端非常简单. 这涉及到两个不同的单词表. 一个是当天可能出现的词汇列表. 那张单子有两千多字. 它们是随机的，按照预先指定的顺序移动. The second word list is the list of valid guesses, 和 that's over 10,000 different words. 就连乔希·沃德尔, 这个人创造了这个版本的游戏, 不知道下一个单词是什么, 这样他就可以玩了. 

做了 《博彩app推荐》 让世界更艰难? 

《博彩app推荐》 made a couple of changes, but only removing words, not adding any words. 为了得体，他们去掉了一些词, 和 then they also removed a few words they thought might be obscure or reflect British instead of American spelling. 所以,不. 他们并没有让事情变得更难.

你们能开发自己的《博彩平台推荐》吗?

There's a Canadian linguist 和 software developer named Aidan Pine, who put up an 世界代码的开放源代码版本 它可以让你为任何语言创造一个新世界. 他在GitHub上有代码库，还有一个 这篇博文非常详细地解释了这一点 如何做到这一点. It's written for people who might not have any software development background. Anyone who's a speaker of any language can build their own Wordle. 

Could open-source Wordle offshoots benefit lesser-known languages? 

Part of my research is looking at how we can use computational methods to support documentation of endangered languages, 支持振兴这些语言的工作. And these kinds of games can be a really great tool for engagement with the language, both for speakers 和 for people who want to learn the language. Pine has built Wordles for two different First Nations languages spoken in British Columbia. Some of the speakers of that language have talked about how it's really helped them—一位女士说她已经做出了承诺 to spend at least 15 minutes a day working on learning her ancestral language. 

沃德尔会留下来吗? 

我不会感到惊讶, 诚实, to see Wordle have the kind of longevity that crossword puzzles do. 这是一项令人满意的活动, with the additional fact that it relies on our own internal knowledge. It doesn't have anything to do with our level of education or what books we've read or things like that. It's really all about our internal knowledge of language 和 things that we inherently know, 不管博彩平台推荐是否意识到博彩平台推荐认识他们. 

计算语言学还如何影响博彩平台推荐的生活?

Computational linguistics/natural language processing is an inherently interdisciplinary field, 和 it informs a hugely important set of technologies these days. 大概20年前我刚进入这个领域的时候, 感觉这是一个非常重要的前沿, 现在它已经成为博彩平台推荐日常生活的一部分. 语言技术, 例如, ranges from things like spell checking 和 predictive text 和 games like Wordle, 像Siri这样的东西, Alexa和谷歌翻译. 

计算语言学家的就业市场是怎样的?  

所有像谷歌这样的大型科技公司, Amazon 和 Facebook are hiring people who know these kinds of technologies. 但他们也在招聘语言学家, because linguists have really great analytical skills to analyze what language is doing, 找出规律是什么, 并找出如何改进这些系统.