[Corpora-List] "Cargo cult" NLP?

[John F Sowa]

On 4/9/2014 12:16 AM, Jason Eisner wrote:
> But this hardly shows that A will do better than B in other settings.
> The advantage might not carry over to other pairs of implementations,
> other training sets, other test distributions, or other evaluation metrics.

For more examples, Google the phrase "damn lies and benchmarks".

Vendors who design new hardware and software have been advertising
their performance on "benchmarks" for over half a century.  But
customers have learned that benchmarks don't answer the question
whether a particular system will solve their problem.

NLP is primarily a branch of engineering.  The challenge for
an engineer is not to get a better score on some "metric", but
to solve a client's problem within the constraints of budgets,
deadlines, and available resources.

John

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