Some of my Best Friends are Linguists (2004) [pdf]

lrec-conf.org

24 points·sushirain··7 comments

Fred Jelinek, who was the pioneer of speech recognition, wrote this. It summarizes the revolution that automatic speech recognition underwent since the 60s: from theory to data-driven science. My new favorite quote on the subject:

"Relationship of linguists to data is the same as that of physicists to their backyard"

Could you clarify what he means in this quote?

Between the famous "whenever I fire a linguist..." quote and the "fuck computational linguistics" meme, I would be hesitant to reveal my linguistics background in a interview.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. It was a different time back then, when work was mainly guided by linguistic theory. I think that linguistic background is a plus. The quote (maybe not his) means that linguists used to ignore actual language usage.

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance." ~Chomsky,1965

Thanks, that makes sense now and I totally agree.

Ugh, so this is example where Chomskyian linguistics just totally overtook the field.

If I had a choice between a linguist and somebody who can speak a language, I would pick the latter.

To do what?

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