[Corpora-List] RE : Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Santos Diana]

Although I have not participated -- mainly because I came from holidays already in the middle of it -- I tremendously enjoyed it, and agree with Cécile and Rob that this is the (one) right place to discuss such issues.

So please go on! 

I avow that discussions of personal atitudes by Chomsky (such as whether he recognized he was worong or not) strike me as uninteresting. Much has already been written about the (science) political atitudes by Chomsky as a scholar (see e.g. Geoffrey Sampson's books) and his influence in the linguistics discipline. But a question that may still be pertinent to ask -- and discuss -- was whether anything he suggested is relevant to corpus linguistics.
 
(Incidentally, I hate this designation, our discipline should be called "empirical linguistics" or at least "linguistics using corpora" or "corpus-based NLP"...)

To add my own bit of discussion, the "corpus of a language" is not the reason we do corpus linguistics -- my impression being that a corpus is to be thought as a sample, a sample that we can manipulate and observe externally (and, therefore, discuss with others our findings on that corpus, and replicate them.) 

I am not sure, either, that anyone is looking for a complete grammar - or the most compact description of a corpus (this last one seems to me VERY suspicious, if a corpus is a sample).

I think that most people doing corpus linguistics see a corpus as a (near) perfect exploratory testbed, where instantaneous access to a lot of intuitions and speech practices can be found, as well as a good (although carefully dealt with) testbed for more developed hypotheses. (For this one you might require carefully designed new corpora, in fact...)

There is also another branch (flavour) of corpus linguistics (?) where you just test and train your own systems, of course, and then the goal is to aid system development. This is the engineering side of corpus linguistics, that again is not well described by its name. "Corpus-based testing & development" might a better name?

In any case, if the corpora-list only had conference announcements and requests for particular applications for particular languages, it would not be half as interesting (IMO) as it is now, thanks to Mike Maxwell, Rob Freeman and others:-)

Diana


________________________________

	From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Rob Freeman
	Sent: 1. september 2007 05:48
	To: Mike Maxwell; CORPORA at UIB.NO
	Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] RE : Chomsky and computational linguistics
	
	
	For me the question of interest is the complexity of descriptions of corpora. Is a complete grammar possible, or is the corpus of a language is the most compact description of itself?
	
	If Chomsky's work is relevant to that, why not talk about it? 
	
	Personally I could do without the "he was right"/"he was wrong" stuff too. It buries the interesting issues and is meaningless in the abstract.
	
	So let's keep it tight to the science/engineering issue. 
	
	But let's talk about it.
	
	If the completeness of grammatical descriptions of corpora is not an appropriate topic for the Corpora list, what is?
	
	-Rob
	
	
	On 8/31/07, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote: 

		Cécile Yousfi wrote:
		> I'm a mere user of the BNC and I'm no Chomsky specialist, but I do enjoy
		> reading interesting discussion on the subject. So please go on
		> discussing the matter on the list.
		> 
		> It's intellectually stimulating to have a genuine dialogue on a
		> theoretical subject, and to be confronted to different points of view.
		
		As one who posted on this subject a couple months ago (and probably 
		posted too much :-), not to mention representing the strident minority
		on this list), I have to say that there's probably a better forum.  This
		list is, after all, about corpora; and while the discussion could have 
		been about whether modeling corpora is about science or engineering, it
		tended to be more about whether Chomsky's approach had any validity, or
		whether he should have admitted defeat, or about other issues that (at 
		least IMO) have less to do with corpora.
		
		I would welcome suggestions for a more appropriate forum.
		--
		        Mike Maxwell
		        maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
		        "Theorists...have merely to lock themselves in a room
		        with a blackboard and coffee maker to conduct their business."
		        --Bruce A. Schumm, Deep Down Things
		
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