Joshua on Jun 10th, 2009Avoiding the Kool-Aid
For the past day I’ve been having a frustrating email discussion with a colleague who has drunk from too much of the Computational Linguistics kool-aid. And by “the kool-aid” I mean the notion that nothing is science unless you can measure it, and that anything that’s not science is somehow voodoo.
The particular topic has [...]
Joshua on Feb 14th, 2009Gradience vs. Phonology: Fight!
Yesterday’s Speech Research Laboratory presentation was by MIT’s Adam Albright, under the title Natural classes are not enough: Biased generalization in novel onset clusters. The link goes to a PDF of the paper on which the talk was based.
I’m not a speech researcher; I’m not really even interested in Phonology, let alone things like [...]
Joshua on Oct 21st, 2008The Merit in What I Do
One of the reasons that I like the “Computational” part better than the “Linguist” part of my job description is that the “computational” part doesn’t give you any bullshit. A program either runs or it doesn’t, it either gets the result it’s supposed to get, or it doesn’t. And while for very complicated [...]