Alas no, though one of the primary focuses of the Computer Science department at the university where I work is NLP and HCI, so I do hear a little about it every now and then.
No, I read about this in WIRED, iirc, an article about how Google has improved their language processing performance.
Google has created a free curriculum for Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, which is pretty informative and not too dense for us normies to understand. I’ve started doing some experiments with Morphological Analysis, and am interested in seeing how we can use technology to augment our understanding and learning of language.
As someone relatively tech-illiterate, I know about Natural Language Processing, but what is HCI in this context?
Hehe, sorry - Human Computer Interaction
Creating adaptive interfaces for this with disabilities, improving the way in which we interact in general, etc.
Oh cool 
Something new to read up on!
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do at the University?
I work in computing at the University of Bath, specifically within the Faculty of Engineering and Design. It’s kind of a hybrid of support work and consultation. If somebody has a research project and needs to have the computing requirements assessed and machines commissioned, or there’s an potential security vulnerability that needs to be mitigated - all that kind of stuff is in my team’s remit.
That’s pretty interesting, or at least it sounds pretty interesting. Do you have a particular specialty / focus?
Find it interesting that this topic is still so active.
Everyone in my team is fairly jack-of-all-trades, but I take a particular interest in cyber security (I’ve been doing a BSc on the side through The Open University) and so I’m the point of contact (for the IT Security team) within the faculty of engineering when it comes to those matters, typically. This is everything from whether somebody has had their account compromised all the way to how to connect wireless robots to the network so they can be controlled by students over telepresence solutions securely.
Over three degrees, theoretical physics, comp-sci, and economics & politics, I think I’d probably be able to measure new words in double digits.
I think we’re agreeing here. Language acquisition as a child is effortless. Language learning at any age is difficult. Language acquisition as an adult requires more free time and resources than I have, at least.
simple nouns describing global objects are a bad example - the word ‘catty’ might be a better one.
How about 交番? Without reading about them, seeing pictures and videos of them, this would be a word empty of meaning. A word I could only use in order to ask what it was. I mean, my mental image is still a tardis… Anyway, a koban is a cultural artefact, in order to understand words, you need the cultural knowledge that they are wrapped up in. This is the sort of thing I’m talking about:
One of my favorite YouTubers once said something along the lines of “the fastest way to increase engagement on the internet is to post something that people disagree with.” 
I’d say you’re grossly underestimating the amount of vocabulary that is unique and specific to those fields, or you had an unusually large vocabulary before entering those studies. Take a look at the Lexile scores for some of the texts in those fields compared to what the average high schooler is required to study.
In the United States, studies have shown that people who possess a BS in one field generally fall in the upper 35% of IQ distribution. Considering the fact that you hold several degrees across different fields, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in the upper 15%. One of the biggest problems new educators run into is overestimating the general learning capacity of the average student, usually because the educator was good at school (largely due to being in the upper 35% of IQ distribution). IQ testing may not be perfect, but IQ is very real and the correlations to academic success and learning capacity are very strong, often underestimated by those gifted with high levels. People with higher IQs can deduce meanings of new words from context quite easily, so it’s possible that you simply considered the new words as previous knowledge without realizing it.
This is a point that is also relevant to this topic as a whole: people who are gifted at learning often make flawed learning frameworks. Sound educational strategies have to be developed and tested for the masses, they’re not proven using the testimonials of a few individuals. Last I checked, any reasonably educated individual developed their language skills through a combination of efforts: immersion, structured education, and exploration. People who don’t receive a structured education (of which a major component is language education) are categorically disadvantaged in every modern society, so anyone who says that structured language education isn’t beneficial should take a hard look at the numbers.
Either you’re mistaken, or you attended an extremely unique high school.
Just for grins, I pulled my undergrad solid state physics text off the shelf and opened to a random page. A few fun words from the first paragraph I saw:
FET (field effect transistor)
depletion layer
free carriers
conductance
equilibrium junction voltage
Which illustrate, among other things, that technical terminology often involves familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. “Equilibrium,” “junction,” and “voltage,” individually, are probably not outside the reach of a typical high school student. But the combined phrase is meaningless unless you know how a junction between two semiconductors works.
I know this as “the best way to get an answer on the internet is not to post a question, but rather to post the wrong answer”.
I wasn’t able to find a good source for Lexile scores for college-level material. Is there one you can recommend?
I do have (another) anecdote to contribute, though. My background is in solid state physics and materials science, so I’m pretty comfortable with the vocabulary of those fields. But last year I found myself reading about computational neuroscience, in connection with artificial intelligence research. Good lord. Japanese is easier. I suspect that specialists in any field tend to underestimate just how specific their field’s terminology is.
Comparison of Lexile scores for university and the workplace
These measurements are, of course, not without their flaws. That said, I’m not sure anyone was really measuring this in an effective manner until around the last decade or so, once we started noticing that the average high school graduates were having significant difficulty succeeding in advanced professions and education.
Agreed on all accounts. My wife is Japanese who would prefer us to speak Japanese as much as possible and I’ve spent ~1 month a year in Japan for 15 years now. Until I picked up Wanikani my Japanese ability was largely stagnant even with all that immersion.
You’re probably right about the unique words in the fields.
I slightly struggle to believe that many people would turn up to start a major in physics without having read about them as a child though; “Jeeze, what was this Einstein guy smoking?” 
