Corpora: linguists and programming

Geoffrey Sampson (geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 15:58:07 +0100

Henning Reetz and I are at cross purposes, I think. Of course, if there
is a standard software package which does just what one needs to do,
nobody would dispute that it makes sense to use it rather than reinvent
the wheel. The issue that sparked off this discussion, though, is that
computational linguists often find themselves needing to do things for
which no standard software exists (and they _should_ often find themselves
in this situation, if the subject is to remain lively and intellectually
creative). In this case, someone must produce some new coding tailored
to the particular problem. My objection is to people who expect other
people to do it for them. Nowadays, the ability to write computer code
is one of the necessary skills in large areas of linguistics, and people
who want to engage in the subject but lack this skill ought to realize
that it is up to them to acquire it. (The fact that someone may have
studied predominantly humanities subjects does not give him a kind of
divine right never to get his hands dirty hacking a bit of code to solve
a problem he encounters, like Ancien R'egime aristocrats who by birth were
entitled not to pay taxes!) Nobody is obliged to devote himself to research
on a given subject, but someone who does must take the rough with the smooth.

Geoffrey Sampson

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

e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
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