Briefs

AP (Mar 6, 2003) reports on BERKELEY, Calif. -- Computer scientist Jon Kleinberg is taking a virtual stroll down the information superhighway, surfing cyberspace for verbal megatrends.

Those hopelessly passe terms were passably hip just a few years back. Then, due to overuse or a feckless public, they fell out of fashion. (Linguists suspect Al Gore of wearing out the superhighway quip.)

Kleinberg's research is really rather scientific. He uses algorithms to identify sudden jumps in the use of words, offering a glimpse into the mechanics of language evolution -- what makes a word hot, or not.

"It's a fun tool to aim at things and see what happens," says Kleinberg, a Cornell University associate professor.

Here is the story from San Jose Mercury News.

The paper by Jon Kleinberg, "Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams", describing this research, was presented at KDD-2002 and is available from Jon Kleinberg website at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber .