<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Surely, the point this interchange has reached has nothing to do with country or variants of a language of the kind a linguist is interested in; for "American truck driver" substitute "local physicist". This has gone into areas where linguistics and NLP have nothing to say if "comprehension" is extended to mean "understands mathematics".<div>Yorick Wilks</div><div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On 22 Dec 2011, at 16:26, Alexander Osherenko wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Justin,<br><br>I mean more the distinction between pragmatics and semantics (<a href="http://oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0146.xml#obo-9780195396577-0146-div1-0010">http://oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0146.xml#obo-9780195396577-0146-div1-0010</a>)<br>
<br>AO<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/12/21 Justin Washtell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lec3jrw@leeds.ac.uk">lec3jrw@leeds.ac.uk</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hello Alexander,<br>
<div class="im"><br>
>> As a human, and an Englishman, I expect I can understand and fairly judge the sentiment of most reviews written by, say, an American truck driver, without undue reprogramming. Is this really an unrealistic goal for our algorithms? And I wonder, is mastering a highly restricted style or register a necessary step in that direction... or is it in fact a detour.<br>
> As a human and as an Englishman, you learned to recognize particular words of English language. Now you understand English in every country but you can't comprehend it. Understanding is only the first step of cognition, comprehension takes much more time and energy. Or can you explain the most severe problems of American truck drivers nowadays? Or tell me what problems you would discuss with an American truck driver? In terms of data mining, it means: you know what features you have in a dataset but you don't know their weights. In my opinion, if you want to learn "weights" you have to live in the country and tune the weights.<br>
<br>
</div>I was referring only to detecting coarse-grained sentiment, not to appreciating the detailed tribulations of the author's lifestyle, but you make a point :-) The distinction you draw between understanding and comprehension is an unfamiliar one to me. I'm not sure whether it is more akin to the distinction I would make between "recognition" and "understanding", or between "undestanding" and "experiencing" (though both of which I concede are fuzzy at best and lure us beyond the pretentiously tidy realms of NLP and into the free-for-all that is philosophy). In any case, please re-interpret my use of the word to mean something closer to what you would call "comprehension".<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
Justin<br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><br>
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