Although Natural Language Processing has witnessed several breakthroughs after its inception, recent academia is witnessing a stall in making further progresses in the field. Various techniques such as Stanford Parser and Neural Networking Machine Learning mostly focus on syntactic analysis of the language. However, from linguistic perspective, language is not only about structures of words and grammatical components, but also about structures of sound. This is what’s called phonetics in linguistics. Strangely, studies on the phonetics have been considered minor compared to other parts of linguistics, such as syntax (which has been the focal points of researchers in NLP) and pragmatics. This can be contributed to the difficulty in ‘scientifically’ studying phonetics of languages, yet when we turn our attentions outside the conventional academic field of ‘linguistics’, this might be solved, probably easier than what we’ve thought.

Folklore, fictions, novels, movies…. stories are everywhere around us. Or, to rephrase this, where people live, stories are alive. Then, why do people crave for stories? Why do people want plots inside their life? This question may be inherently linked to the functions of brain. (Or, will this also be refuted by scientists from the future generation just like scientists from our generation don’t believe that the ‘mind’ is the place where people’s thoughts reside?) We want the linearity or logics for our life, which can pursuade human reason. Cause and Effect, which seems to compose every This lies at the center of ‘historical accounts’, ‘folklore’, and even ‘success stories’ This is the reason why people are still fascinated by the stories of heroes as in Illiad and Odyssey, Perseponian Wars, Star Wars and even in Harry Potter Series. Langue and Parole, Signifiant and Signifie, seem to be able to describe most of the human activities on the earth (and in the universe).

What if we can create new society made of the best practices around the world, following the footsteps of claud-Levi Strauss’s Comparative Cultural Studies?

For this year’s SocInfo Proposal.