Corpora: Chomsky/Harris - one more fun question.

[Tony Perretta]

Hello and thankyou Steve and especially Mary...

> First a point of clarification: Chomsky has never, to my
> knowledge, "discredited" the use of corpora. ....

snip

> The
> conclusion is that a corpus is never enough.

I was close! Actually I knew this ... but it wasn't the real thrust of my
question anyway.  It is almost always good to be clear ... in my defence I
would say that I am very new to all this. I only started reading up on this
stuff a few weeks ago.

> It is unfortunate that many people in the corpus
> linguistics community have put themselves in opposition
> to Chomskyan linguists. (At the recent conference on
> Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching in Boston,
> sevral references were made to "the enemy' at MIT.
> That is a most unfortunate, and unnecessary, view.)

Sounds strange to me from my position as somebody who knows nothing much
about anything at all. Chomsky's innate language acquisition device thingy
seems to make a lot of sense ... In the last few days reading it seems that
the only real way forward for machine translation is the effective synthesis
of the statistical corpus-based apprach and the symbolic formal grammar
approach. I am sure I have no real clue of what I am talking about but all
this new found knowledge has to get out somehow ...

> .... I have a very little information
> on Harris's approach to parsing and such things.

Shame

..... snip some stuff about string grammar

> Another implementation was built by Aravind
> Joshi. I do not know specifically of any statistical
> parsers based on Harrisian transformational grammar,
> but parsing is not my field so there could well be some.

Interestingly Joshi and Harris built what I suspect was one of the very first
parsing programs in the late 50s at Penn Uni. using a Harrisian grammar.

I do have a silly question - does anyone on this list think a HAL-like
computer that can effectively interact will EVER exist? I know this is a
trivial question for you guys but surely this is the holy grail ... I
personally have my doubts that a machine alone could ever be creative anough
to achieve this. I can only think that there may one day be a way to implant
some kind of technology into brains ....

I think I'll shut up now ....

Gnite

Tony Perretta