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January 14, 2005

A useful abstraction

Today, at the CSBi conference, I heard David Searls give a talk relating biology to lingustics and engineered circuits. I have to say that it was one of the most interesting talks that I've ever heard. He basically spent a long time going over how biological problems can be related to linguistical problems, and described how lingustics has put forward some answers to their problem.

Essentially he made an analogy between linguistic analysis and hierarchies in biology. In linguistic analysis, there are four levels - Lexical (words), Syntactical (grammar), Semantic (meaning) and Pragmatic (context). You can see that this list is arranged in order of complexity. His analogy to biology was to place protein domains at the Lexical level, proteins themselves at the Syntactical level, protein function at the Semantic level - and a new concept, the role of a protein, at the Pragmatic level.

There's an interesting problem in linguistics called ambiguity. I'm sure you can come up with a whole bunch of sentances pretty quick where a particular word could have a variable meaning. He didn't go into the biological analogy of ambiguity too much, but it seems apropos; after all, one protein may have different substrates, and depending on context it may be regulated by different factors. This also plays significantly into the idea of contextuality - an important concept in deciphering linguistic ambiguity.

It's a shame that much of his talk has slipped my mind at this point. He works for GlaxoSmithKline and this isn't his official research, so I don't think there's any paper out there to read on this subject. There was more on the use of metaphors - both linguistic and technical - but I can't seem to recall it now.

Sent from: Karl Gutwin

Posted by kgutwin at January 14, 2005 09:45 PM

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