RE: [Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics

From: Christopher Brewster (C.Brewster@dcs.shef.ac.uk)
Date: Sun Oct 02 2005 - 03:24:00 MET DST

  • Next message: John F. Sowa: "Re: [Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics"

    I agree entirely with the view of Grzegorz.

    It may of course vary with age, intelligence and talent, but personally I
    think computing involves a lot of hours of studying and acquiring a set of
    skills which dealing with the difficulties of the linguistic aspects of NLP
    do not.

    Let me put it another way. A naïve computer scientist will try a regular
    expression and find it only works some of the time. He will then have to
    deal with the irregularity of language either by creating lists of
    exceptions or more complex rules or both.

    A naïve linguist does not have this luxury. He will have to learn
    perl/python, regular expressions all a collection of statistical foundations
    which few linguistic degrees provide. An linguists have little transferable
    expertise in software engineering and systems design which as soon as a one
    wants to make a complex system are needed.

    I would draw a paralel with studying classical archeology and not having
    done ten years of latin and greek. Possible but tough.

    I speak as a linguist by original training.

    Christopher Brewster

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    Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
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    idea within a wall of words.--- Samuel Butler

     

      

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no
    > [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Grzegorz Chrupala
    > Sent: 01 October 2005 10:28
    > To: corpora@uib.no
    > Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying
    > Computational Linguistics
    >
    > On 26/09/05, Mark P. Line <mark@polymathix.com> wrote:[...]>
    > And since it's a lot easier for a good linguist to
    > understand> software than it is for a good computer scientist
    > to understand human> language, I'd go for a computational
    > linguistics program that is closely> allied with (or even
    > part of) a linguistics program.
    > FWIW, I think exactly the opposite is true: it is easier to
    > understandlinguistics if you're a computing scientist than
    > viceversa. Eventhough human language is more complex than the
    > subject matter of CS,linguistics is still much less
    > technically (i.e. mathematically)challenging than computing.
    > Compare for example the level ofsophistication in chapter 2
    > (Mathematical Foundations) and chapter 3(Linguistic
    > Essentials) in Manning and Schütze's Foundations
    > ofStatistical NLP.Cheers,--Grzegorz Chrupala ? pithekos.net ?
    > pithekos.net/brainwave
    >

                    
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