Corpora: linguists and programming

Geoffrey Sampson (geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 15:29:09 +0100

I wasn't thinking of my graduate student Marco da Rocha when I wrote
my earlier message about linguistics researchers expecting other people
to do their programming for them; but it seems to me that his response
has rather confirmed my point! Marco contributed hugely to the life of
this School while he was with us, so that people were glad to collaborate
with him; and he rationed his computing requests and scattered them
round widely, so that no one person was overburdened. All the same, if
a whole department-ful of people took the line that "I am a linguist and
I cannot write programs", even here at Sussex the computer-capable people
wouldn't be able to meet the demand. Realistically, in the 1990s, the
expectation surely has to be "I am a linguist, so I need to teach myself to
write programs".

Geoffrey Sampson

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
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