Re: [Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

From: Rob Freeman (lists@chaoticlanguage.com)
Date: Fri Oct 14 2005 - 07:40:37 MET DST

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    Stefan,

    You are writing a dissertation on distributional methods?

    Perhaps you can tell me what the current orthodoxy is towards what I
    understand was Chomsky's earliest controversial result: that distributional
    methods applied to language result in a loss of generality of representation.

    i.e. In "Logical basis of linguistic theory"(at least as reported by Fred
    Newmeyer in his "Generative Linguistics -- A Historical Perspective"):

    "Halle has pointed out that it is generally impossible to provide a level of
    representation meeting the biuniqueness condition without destroying the
    generality of rules..." (Chomsky, LBLT)

    I understand this was Chomksy's earliest controversial result, that it created
    quite a stir, and essentially killed the distributional analysis which had
    been the dominant linguistic orthodoxy of the day.

    Am I right that his objection was never really successfully addressed, only
    forgotten? I can't find too much about it. Perhaps you know.

    Thanks,

    Rob Freeman

    On Wednesday 28 September 2005 01:57, Stefan Bordag wrote:
    > Dear Dana,
    >
    > > I am looking for the list of linguistic principles used to extract
    > > semantic information from corpora. I mean principles like, for example,
    > > the Distributional Hypothesis introduced by Hearst.
    >
    > Are you looking for principles, methods, algorithms or implementations?
    > principles: syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
    > methods: statistical, pattern based, syntactic annotation based
    > algorithms: ah, many different ;-)
    > implementations: unfortunately not too many freely available, depends on
    > what you really need.
    >
    > As far as I know, Harris introduced the distributional hypothesis. Hearst
    > was one of those who implemented it.
    >
    > If you could provide me with more detailed information about your goals,
    > perhaps I could help you since I am writing a dissertation on that topic
    > currently.
    >
    > Best regards,
    > Stefan Bordag



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