[Corpora-List] Suggested Track for Studying Computational Linguistics

[Mark P. Line]

I agree with all your points. A majority of linguists would consider me a
math-head as well, I think.

My main concern is when people forget that formalism is just a map (not
the territory), and that the best maps allow you to see the territory in
your mind's eye without actually being there.

There are as yet no formalisms for describing human language that actually
do that very well. However, there is an enormous amount of non-formal
descriptive work that provides us with some extremely useful maps.

-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX



John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> I've been a long-term "math-head", but I sympathize
> with your point to a considerable extent:
>
> MPL> As a matter of personal preference, I could do
>  > with fewer math-heads in linguistics.
>
> There are quite a few people with both linguistics
> degrees and other kinds of degrees who try to pursue
> elegant formalisms at the expense of preserving the
> phenomena.
>
> In fact, some of the worst offenders are those who do
> *not* have math or comp. sci. degrees.  They suffer
> from a certain degree of math envy and overcompensate
> by becoming "more formal than thou".  One could accuse
> Chomsky of that fault, but there are many, many others.
>
> There are also people with a solid background in logic,
> such as Montague, who have tried to force their view
> of logic onto language.  Although I believe the formal
> semanticists have made some interesting contributions,
> I also believe that lexical semantics has made far more
> useful contributions to NLP as well as theoretical
> linguistics.  Barbara P. has also been softening her
> views on that issue.  (See the quotation below.)
>
> And I would add one further advantage of having a good
> background in math:  self defense.  It gives you enough
> self confidence to see through the some of the empty
> formalism.  (See the poem by Henry Kautz below.)
>
> John Sowa
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> Source: http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2005/RGGU054.pdf
>
> In Montague’s formal semantics the simple predicates of the
> language of intensional logic (IL), like love, like, kiss,
> see, etc., are regarded as symbols (similar to the “labels”
> of [predicate calculus]) which could have many possible
> interpretations in many different models, their “real meanings”
> being regarded as their interpretations in the “intended model”.
> Formal semantics does not pretend to give a complete characterization
> of this “intended model”, neither in terms of the model structure
> representing the “worlds” nor in terms of the assignments of
> interpretations to the lexical constants. The present formalizations
> of model-theoretic semantics are undoubtedly still rather primitive
> compared to what is needed to capture many important semantic
> properties of natural languages, including for example spatial
> and other perceptual representations which play an important role
> in many aspects of linguistic structure. The logical structure
> of language is a real and important part of natural language
> and we have fairly well-developed tools for describing it. There
> are other approaches to semantics that are concerned with other
> aspects of natural language, perhaps even cognitively “deeper”
> in some sense, but which we presently lack the tools to adequately
> formalize. It is to be hoped that these different approaches can
> be seen as complementary and not necessarily antagonistic.
> ____________________________________________________________
>
>     If your thesis is utterly vacuous,
>     Use first-order predicate calculus.
>        With sufficient formality,
>        The sheerest banality
>     Will be hailed by all as miraculous.
>
>     If your thesis is quite indefensible,
>     Reach for semantics intensional.
>        Over Montague grammar,
>        Your committee will stammer,
>     Not admitting it's incomprehensible!
>
> by Henry Kautz
>
>
>
>


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX