[Corpora-List] Proposal for initiating a global non continentalArabic Language Academy

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi,

2009/11/16 El-Haj, Mahmoud <melhaj at essex.ac.uk>:
> Dear Hamed,
>
>  Arabic shares characteristics with other living languages, which could be very helpful as Arabic NLP still in it's preliminary phases comparing to others.

There may be more to this than it seems. I notice that
Regina Barzilay/MIT CSAIL: is giving seminars entitled
 "Embracing Language Diversity: Unsupervised Multilingual
Learning?"  wherein I think she tries to establish the idea that
unsupervised training of parsers works even better if you
train them on multiple languages, simultaneously. (or something
like that, I haven't seen the lectures yet.)

The upshot is that I think that it would be a mistake to pretend
that Arabic NLP is an island, needing only short-term help until
it catches up with other languages. More likely, one has to
consider in context, and fully embrace "comparative linguistics",
in both its traditional, and now,, maybe more modern senses.

--linas

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