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The Sandwich Space: Using Statistical Breakdowns to Explore Semantic Categories
September 26 at 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
The Department of Linguistics/TESL Presents
Sarah MacDugall Ph.D. Student, University at Buffalo
Background: The question of whether a hotdog is a sandwich has been asked around dinner tables with friends, at water coolers with coworkers, and in an interview between Stephen Colbert and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite the cult popularity of this question, very little quantitative work has been done to address it.
This project explores how certain words or concepts fit into the broader category of “sandwich,” how they relate to each other within that category, and how the space might differ across various language communities. It also considers how fuzzy categories might be approached when they have real world legal implications. This unresolved line of questioning offers several possibilities for future work in linguistic, computational, and cognitive domains.
Register to join via Zoom
The Sandwich Space: Using Statistical Breakdowns to Explore Semantic Categories, event flyer (PDF)
