[Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics

[John F. Sowa]

I partially agree with Mark Line:

ML> I think statistical NLP is not linguistics --

But I would qualify the following point:

ML> it's what computer scientists do instead of
 > linguistics.

I would say that it's what *anybody* would do when
the problem is not sufficiently well understood to
suggest a more explanatory model.

I also agree with Christopher Brewster:

CB> 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.

But I would add that linguistics requires skills that
are independent of the skills of a computer scientist.
Linguists who only know one natural language may be very
good at what they do, but their intuitions into the nature
of language may leave something to be desired.

For any student interested in linguistics (computational
or otherwise), I would recommend the "reflections" by
Barbara Partee, who majored in math as an undergraduate
with a minor in philosophy and Russian.  Then she went to
MIT to earn a PhD under Chomsky and then taught linguistics
at UCLA, where she learned formal semantics from Montague:

    http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/BHP_Essay_Feb05.pdf
    Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005

That background is hard to duplicate, but some similarly
varied set of skills combined with a great deal of native
talent would be conducive to innovation.

John Sowa