[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[chris brew]

>
>
>
> I don't think the problem has been our techniques, which have been good
> for 50 years or more (until Chomsky noticed they gave multiple inconsistent
> results.) The problem has been our goals. If we change our goal from that of
> finding one complete grammar (and the functional, cognitive guys are just as
> guilty of this, not to mention the engineers and machine learning guys),



I might agree with most of this. But not with the account I think Rob is
giving of what the engineers are doing. I say "think" because I assume
 Rob's  "not to mention" is
saying that the engineers are in the same boat as the rest on the
philosophical issues anout grammar. Anyway, only under a very liberal
interpretation of what it means to have "one complete grammar" can the kinds
of models that dominated this year's CL conferences be seen as pursuit of
the goal that Rob ascribes. Rather, the engineers and machine learning
people seem to me entirely open to using whatever structures and predictive
features can drive up their performance figures. It's taken a while, but my
impression is that syntactically inspired notions such as dependency
relations are gaining a bit more traction in this activity than was the case
a couple of years ago.  The relevant syntactic notions have been around
essentially forever, but only lately are people understanding how to exploit
them well enough to get benefit. There is a lot of variation in how able and
willing the engineers are to put in the effort to reduce unfamiliar concepts
expressed in the terminology of other fields to effective engineering
practice. That should be no surprise.

Also, although such things are obviously a minority taste at ACL,  Mark
Johnson and colleagues have been doing work that opens up a few options that
theoreticians might want to think about. In particular, they are working
with rather flexible grammars for which no exact inference algorithms are
known, and instead use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to obtain posterior
distributions over grammatical analyses. Open-minded syntacticians reading
this list might want to meditate on whether this way of doing business is a
relevant and interesting challenge to their standard assumptions, and if so,
how to respond in a constructive way.

Chris

Here's a citation for some of the work by Johnson and colleagues. There's
more on his publications page.

Mark Johnson, Thomas L. Griffiths and Sharon Goldwater (2007) Adaptor
Grammars: A Framework for Specifying Compositional Nonparametric Bayesian
Models<http://www.cog.brown.edu/~mj/papers/JohnsonGriffithsGoldwater06AdaptorGrammars.pdf>,
to appear in Proceedings of NIPS.
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