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From: jamie@cs.sfu.ca (Jamie Andrews)
Subject: Re: The Light Side of Darkness
Message-ID: <1995Jan23.193309.23599@cs.sfu.ca>
Organization: Faculty of Applied Science, Simon Fraser University
References: <3fruvv$n9u@mango.aloha.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 1995 19:33:09 GMT
Lines: 30

In article <3fruvv$n9u@mango.aloha.com>,
Chaumont Devin <devin@aloha.com> wrote:
>Proposition:  Most computational linguists know nothing about linguistics.

     Chaumont, let me be frank... your articles so far on this
newsgroup have been like bad '70s AI work:  full of
technical-sounding language and buzzphrases, based on flimsy and
poorly-defined cognitive theories, and heavily spiced with hype.
I suspect that most of the computational linguists here (which
I do not claim to number among) are simply ignoring you because
they can't see any promise in your work.  This is not to say
that your theories cannot have any merit, just that you haven't
given any reason to believe that they will.

     That said, it is true that most computational linguists
know very little about some areas of linguistics -- historical
linguistics, for instance.  But that does not mean that they are
not qualified to study other aspects of it.

     Computational linguists have developed a consensus on what
things are important to study and how to talk about it.  As in
most scientific disciplines, you have to either speak their
language and convince them within the context of their own
studies, or else come up with results.  So far I haven't seen
any evidence that you have done either.  In the absence of that,
trying to insult the linguists here will not get you anywhere.

--Jamie.
  jamie@cs.sfu.ca
"Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?"
