[Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics

[B Babych]

John,

Your example about Barbara Partee reminded me what it is frequently said:

-- linguists often become the best programmers and computer scientists, 
given the examples of Larry Wall (the inventor of Perl) and Noam Chomsky 
(for his contribution to formal language theory).


Do you think there can be any explanation of this fact, or something
beyond a mere coincidence?

(To be fair, there are also examples when computer scientists became most 
prominent linguists).


Bogdan Babych


On Sun, 2 Oct 2005, John F. Sowa wrote:

> 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