An Allusion in Webster

Is the musical retard an allusion to physical motion?

The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion

We describe here a method for discovering imitative textual allusions in a large collection of Classical Latin poetry. In translating the logic of literary allusion into computational terms, we include not only traditional IR variables such as token similarity and ngrams, but also incorporate a comparison of syntactic structure as well. This provides a more robust search method for Classical la...

Discovering Poetic Allusion in Anthologies of Classical Japanese Poems

Waka is a form of traditional Japanese poetry with a 1300year history. In this paper we attempt to semi-automatically discover instances of poetic allusion, or more generally, to find similar poems in anthologies of waka poems. The key to success is how to define the similarity measure on poems. We first examine the existing similarity measures on strings, and then give a unifying framework tha...

Webster, privacy, and RU486.

The Richard Webster Medal

There have recently been moves afoot among evolutionary biologists to stop speaking of ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’ and, instead, to call it ‘Darwin’s law of evolution’. This is to stymie creationists who like to say ‘evolution is only a theory’. Now I am all in favour of stymieing creationists, but I think that this idea is misguided. The underlying assumption is that the use of the word ‘La...