Linguist vs CompScientist?

[Detmar Meurers]

Hi Laura,

Chris characterized an important difference between doing Comp-Ling
in a CS vs. in a Linguistics department: the emphasis of the
required (or even available) courses and that of one's peer group.
Here are some more thoughts along those lines:

My impression is that in many CS departments linguistics is viewed
like a general education requirement - supposedly it's good for you,
but it's not essential. For example, talking to several recent CL
graduates from CS departments recently (our CIS department was
hiring), I got the impression that taking one or two linguistics
courses in total is considered enough training in linguistics to do
CL. I'm not sure if that's sufficient even for the applied,
engineering side of the field, but e.g. looking at the leading
figures in CL many appear to have a deeper knowledge of linguistics.

On the other hand, computational linguistics is increasingly common
in linguistics department, where it often seems to be viewed as
simply another subfield added to the already existing linguistics
canon of courses.  This perspective misses that doing CL requires
good formal foundations, knowledge of data structures/algorithms,
practical experience, and courses/seminars exploring the links
between linguistic data and theories and computational applications.

Independent of whether you're looking at a CS or Linguistics
department, I would therefore recommend checking into what courses
are offered regularly (i.e. at least every year) as part of the CL
program/track and whether there are regular faculty members that
actually do CL, in particular the kind of CL you're interested in.
Also, I would make sure that the different strands of CL are
represented, i.e. both theory-driven and data-driven approaches, in
introductory courses and advanced seminars.

In terms of US PhD programs, I think I would consider at least
Stanford, OSU, Penn, Brown, and Cornell.

Lieben Gruß,
Detmar

--
Detmar Meurers                              Fax: Int + 614 292-8833
The Ohio State University                   Tel: Int + 614 292-0461
Department of Linguistics                   E-Mail: dm at ling.osu.edu
1712 Neil Avenue, Oxley Hall     Homepage: http://ling.osu.edu/~dm/
Columbus OH 43210-1298, USA    PGP key on web page (use encouraged)

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly
one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to
suit facts." Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" (A. C. Doyle)