Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine

America’s Constitution, Written and Unwritten

Normalising Audio Transcriptions for Unwritten Languages

The task of documenting the world’s languages is a mainstream activity in linguistics which is yet to spill over into computational linguistics. We propose a new task of transcription normalisation as an algorithmic method for speeding up the process of transcribing audio sources, leading to text collections of usable quality. We report on the application of sentence and word alignment algorith...

Large-Scale Text Collection for Unwritten Languages

Existing methods for collecting texts from endangered languages are not creating the quantity of data that is needed for corpus studies and natural language processing tasks. This is because the process of transcribing and translating from audio recordings is too onerous. A more effective method, we argue, is to involve local speakers in the field location, using an audio-only translation inter...

Empirical Doctrine

We can observe and measure how legal decision makers use formal legal authorities, but there is no way to empirically test the determinative capacity of legal doctrine itself. Yet discussions of empirical studies of judicial behavior sometimes conflate judges’ attention to legal rules with legal rules determining outcomes. Doctrinal determinacy is not the same thing as legal predictability. The...

The Doctrine of Signatures.

‘The Doctrine of Signatures’ started with the idea that God has marked everything he created with a sign (signature). The sign showed the purpose for the creation of the item. The ‘Doctrine of Signatures’ was promulgated by the writings of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a shoemaker in Görlitz, Germany, who had a profound mystical vision in which he saw a relationship between God and man that caused h...