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

From: John F. Sowa (sowa@bestweb.net)
Date: Sun Oct 02 2005 - 08:12:59 MET DST

  • Next message: B Babych: "Re: [Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics"

    I partially agree with Mark Line:

    ML> I think statistical NLP is not linguistics --

    But I would qualify the following point:

    ML> it's what computer scientists do instead of
    > linguistics.

    I would say that it's what *anybody* would do when
    the problem is not sufficiently well understood to
    suggest a more explanatory model.

    I also agree with Christopher Brewster:

    CB> 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.

    But I would add that linguistics requires skills that
    are independent of the skills of a computer scientist.
    Linguists who only know one natural language may be very
    good at what they do, but their intuitions into the nature
    of language may leave something to be desired.

    For any student interested in linguistics (computational
    or otherwise), I would recommend the "reflections" by
    Barbara Partee, who majored in math as an undergraduate
    with a minor in philosophy and Russian. Then she went to
    MIT to earn a PhD under Chomsky and then taught linguistics
    at UCLA, where she learned formal semantics from Montague:

        http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/BHP_Essay_Feb05.pdf
        Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005

    That background is hard to duplicate, but some similarly
    varied set of skills combined with a great deal of native
    talent would be conducive to innovation.

    John Sowa

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