Time Flies Like an Arrow, Fruit Flies Like a Banana

[Joel S. Berson]

At 11/12/2006 11:05 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>the Oettinger (which needs to be checked out) certainly comes from
>the right time period; the quote was a little joke (and object
>lesson) among computational linguists in the 60s, illustrating the
>pervasiness of ambiguity in ordinary language and the importance of
>background knowledge and plausibility in the processing of ordinary
>language.  i have no idea who said it first, though.

I was a student of Tony (Anthony G.) Oettinger's, Prof. of Computer
Science in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at
Harvard, in the late 1950s.  One of his interests then was
computational linguistics.  I believe I saw the example around then
(although I also used to read Scientific American), and can easily
convince myself that Oettinger used it (before 1960); it sounds like
him.  (If I still have my class notes, I could probably prove
it!  Unlikely, though -- or that if I did, I could find them.)

Why doesn't someone (Fred?) contact Oettinger and ask?  Perhaps he
can send an MS.
      617-495-4114
      anthony at deas.harvard.edu  -- or perhaps
      pirp at deas.harvard.edu

Joel

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