tedster - 4:18 am on May 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

I love the comic relief in that PPT file - the examples of the trouble that word sense ambiguity can cause in real newspaper headlines:

Drunk Gets Nine Years In Violin Case Farmer Bill Dies In House Prostitutes Appeal To Pope Stolen Painting Found By Tree Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge Deer Kill 300,000 Residents Can Drop Off Trees Include Children When Baking Cookies Miners Refuse To Work After Death

And after the chuckles stop, then I look at my web page copy and see if I am doing anything like this. I know from trying to have precise technical discussions, both here and with clients, that words can be very slippery.

I'm thinking that the much maligned computer translations that are available online could be a friend in this area. Run a troubled page through a couple translations: en > fr > en or whatever -- and notice what words get badly trashed in the final output