[Corpora-List] RE : Chomsky and computational linguistics
Yorick Wilks
Yorick at dcs.shef.ac.uk
Sun Sep 2 04:49:32 UTC 2007
For anyone interested in the history of these issues and the original
split, one might call it, between Chomsky and computational linguistics,
a key witness is Vic Yngve, who was at MIT in the earliest days of CL
[he is in one sense the founder of CL--as distinct from MT] and broke
with Chomsky over the key
issue of syntax and processing. You can see Yngve's reminiscences of
the row at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/YngveInterview.html
Yorick Wilks
On 2 Sep 2007, at 05:14, Terry wrote:
>
> The assertion that "discussions of personal attitudes by Chomsky
> (such as
> whether he recognized he was wrong or not) strikes me as
> uninteresting"
> strikes me as being consistent with Chomsky's own method of
> procedure. (For
> the record, though, he has not.)
>
> Chomsky's work is replete with strong attitudinal judgments about what
> linguistic work is ‘vacuous’ or ‘empty’ or has ‘no
> bearing’ (Aspects of the
> Theory of Syntax 40, 204, 54, 20, 41, 53, 126f). This mode of
> rhetoric is
> simply a means for dismissing whatever area of work Chomsky himself
> has no
> interest in exploring. And, as everyone on this list knows, one of his
> favourite areas for discouraging exploration was ... corpus
> linguistics!
> Good job no one was listening to his advice too closely.
>
> Terry
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On
> Behalf Of
> Santos Diana
> Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 10:48 PM
> To: Rob Freeman; Mike Maxwell; CORPORA at UIB.NO
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] RE : Chomsky and computational linguistics
>
> 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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