[Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics

[Christopher Brewster]

I agree entirely with the view of Grzegorz.

It may of course vary with age, intelligence and talent, but personally 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.

Let me put it another way. A naïve computer scientist will try a regular
expression and find it only works some of the time. He will then have to
deal with the irregularity of language either by creating lists of
exceptions or more complex rules or both.

A naïve linguist does not have this luxury. He will have to learn
perl/python, regular expressions all a collection of statistical foundations
which few linguistic degrees provide. An linguists have little transferable
expertise in software engineering and systems design which as soon as a one
wants to make a complex system are needed.

I would draw a paralel with studying classical archeology and not having
done ten years of latin and greek. Possible but tough.

I speak as a linguist by original training.

Christopher Brewster

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Natural Language Processing Group,
Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
Tel: +44(0)114-22.21967  Fax: +44 (0)114-22.21810
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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of an 
idea within a wall of words.---  Samuel Butler

 


  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no 
> [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Grzegorz Chrupala
> Sent: 01 October 2005 10:28
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying 
> Computational Linguistics
> 
> On 26/09/05, Mark P. Line <mark at polymathix.com> wrote:[...]> 
> And since it's a lot easier for a good linguist to 
> understand> software than it is for a good computer scientist 
> to understand human> language, I'd go for a computational 
> linguistics program that is closely> allied with (or even 
> part of) a linguistics program.
> FWIW, I think exactly the opposite is true: it is easier to 
> understandlinguistics if you're a computing scientist than 
> viceversa. Eventhough human language is more complex than the 
> subject matter of CS,linguistics is still much less 
> technically (i.e. mathematically)challenging than computing. 
> Compare for example the level ofsophistication in chapter 2 
> (Mathematical Foundations) and chapter 3(Linguistic 
> Essentials) in Manning and Schütze's Foundations 
> ofStatistical NLP.Cheers,--Grzegorz Chrupala ? pithekos.net ? 
> pithekos.net/brainwave
> 


		
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