Comment by gliese1337 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gliese1337 | Hacker News Reader

  Linguists don’t know squat about grammar in modern times. Everything is a verb these days. I Google things. I FedEx things. My game gets nerfed.

That's a bit broad. Talk to the right kind of linguists, and yes, they do know these things.

Every problem he talks about is well-known. Not to say that they aren't still problems- they are problems, and hard ones, that linguists (computational and otherwise) don't have good standard solutions for. Thing is, most of the time, you can get away with not bothering to solve the real problem. Most of the time, you can pretend that white-space separates words and periods separated sentences and that 8 parts of speech is good enough, and it will be good enough. And thus the incentive to spend lots of time and research money on solving all of the big problems in natural language processing is reduced.

Except when it isn't good enough, and we wonder "why the heck hasn't this been solved yet? Doesn't anybody realize that this library is totally broken?" But yeah, we know that it's broken, we know what the problems are, they're just really frickin' hard.

You are right there are a select few. But it is very few. I linked to the quora as just one example. The challenge is that they focus on what is "right" not what is "common".

It is like swum. It is a real word, and I have swum many times in my pool, but it is not how humans write. More of practical linguistics is about how people use words, not how they are supposed to use words.

Linguists get descriptivism drilled into them from day one! If anyone who goes on about what is "right" I would highly doubt they were trained as a linguist.

You could perhaps instead mean "standard" instead of "right" - that they're describing a standard dialect, which doesn't meet reality. That could be true, I'm sure it is in places.

Btw, I'd be interested to know how many parts of speech the CGEL describes. Anyone got easy access?

> You are right there are a select few. But it is very few.

Man! How do you come up with these "facts"?

> I linked to the quora as just one example.

So, Ɐx(CommentsOnQuora(x) -> Linguist(x))?

And by the way, linguists are trained to think like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nYmWt1J4Lg. If you want a wider commentary, read http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5

You guys probably do good work. Making wild claims reflects badly on the company; all the more so if the CxO does it.

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