Oh hell yea.

I want to take this and hand it out to the Cognitive Science students at my old university.

This looks like a game of "1000 blank white cards" actually.

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Best IMHO:

http://xkcd.com/c77.html
http://xkcd.com/c109.html
http://xkcd.com/c100.html
http://xkcd.com/c78.html
http://xkcd.com/c65.html
http://xkcd.com/c54.html

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yeah, those were my top snicker inducers as well...

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Bwahahahaaaaa! Excellent!

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Thx. Now officially my new favorite web comic.

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This one explains why geek boys often have so much trouble in the dating world.

Well, that, and poor personal hygiene.

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The square root of love is an imaginary number. The typical geek boy just isn't normally that socially complex, so love is at right angles to his worldview.

(And yes, unfortunately, so is soap.)

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Bother. I always did have trouble groking imaginary numbers.

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Great. Do you have any idea what the Fourier transform of love would be?

(Would it give you the frequency of...nevermind.)

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(I have a degree in linguistics so I can claim to know something!) Since computational linguistics is mostly about attempts at models to achieve some ends beyond the models, dozens of contradictory models is fine. Nobody complains about machine learning people trying different ML approaches for the same tasks.

Linguistics, on the other hand, and particularly syntax and sematics, is mostly people just making shit up.

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I spent a bit over a year working in a C.L. group at UCB, and I feel I can say with confidence that the word "bullshit" was invented to describe the entire field. For two words, I'd go with "intellectually corrupt". For a sentence, I guess I'd go with "we don't have to actually believe in our research as long as DARPA keeps giving us money". As far as I could tell, there hadn't been a single advance in the field since the mid 70s, and nobody involved was even remotely interested in solving any actual problems (unless that problem was "how do I parrot out enough words to get my PhD and get the hell out of here without producing a single working line of code".)

So, yeah, that cartoon has a certain resonance for me.

(Oh, and has Cyc woken up yet? Hahahahahahahahaha.)

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I read the first phrase there as as "I spent a bitter year"... anticipating the rest of the paragraph perhaps :)

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Heh. They hadn't woken up the last time I dealt with them, but mentioning the name was always a ticket to a few million more in free govt/DHS/TIA money, at least as of a few years back. Honestly, they don't have to wake up, as long as money keeps getting shoveled at them - their approach is apparently working.
Now actually getting the KB to work in any application that stresses it at all, even after the rewrite? That's interesting, in the Chinese curse sense.

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Some years ago, CycCorp laid off a bunch of workers. Our lab is located about half a mile away from MCC/CycCorp, and we received lots of resumes from those guys, all of which extolling their skills in 'Ontological Engineering'.

Basically, entirely useless to us.

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So, how come that commercial MT is only about as good as it was ten years ago? Seriously, I have a MT (English-to-Spanish) program I bought off the shelf in 1994, and it works just as well as Google Translate and present-day Bablefish. They must all share a heritage, too, since all three make the exact same mistakes.

Computers have gotten mush faster, memory and disks have grown exponentially, software engineering techniques have improved, somewhat. Why isn't MT any better?

Plus, computational linguistics papers are the same as they were twenty years ago: one tiny micro-domain of theory per paper, averaging about a dozen actual examples; very few corpus-based approaches -- probably about the same proportion. And the corpuses (corpi?) haven't gotten any bigger.

I'm with the cartoonist.

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Since computational linguistics is mostly about attempts at models to achieve some ends beyond the models, dozens of contradictory models is fine.

Not when there's no pressure to select for the more correct models, it isn't. It's like the approach of the granddaddy of taking money from the DoD and doing things of negative value for it—Noam on Corpus Linguistics, “True sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology don't just collect lots and lots of data,”—fuck the data, this model has a superficial elegance I like!

Linguistics, on the other hand, and particularly syntax and sematics, is mostly people just making shit up.

Syntax and semantics are people making shit up; corpus linguistics, diachronics, descriptive fieldwork, descriptive atlases of English dialects are mostly not.

My BA was more or less in computational linguistics; when and if I do a masters, it won't be, because I fear JWZ is mostly correct in his judgement of the field. I would love to work with Michael Tomasello.; he seems to be doing what the CL/Chomskyan people should have been doing long ago, and doing it well. Excuse the repost; I got the Chomsky quote wrong.

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Syndicated at xkcd_rss if you haven't noticed already.

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Thank you!

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There's also the official feed, xkcd_rss

Just, you know, FYI.

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I doubt that any one researcher can subscribe to a set of contradictory models at the same time and still be taken seriously. The field as a whole has produced such contradictory models -- just like about any other science as well. So where's the problem?

der.
(posting from the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2006, incidentally)

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I still don't take you seriously.

BNC
(posting from a birdcage in a tacky Baltimore apartment, incidently)

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Clearly, it's some kind of VC-money-laundering scheme.

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Sorry, Lexxe has just experienced Internet connection problem. Please try a few minutes later. Thank you for your cooperation.

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That name-logo thing (containing no spaces, four colors, three font sizes, one made up word of ambiguous pronunciation and a non-occurring letter combination, one abbreviation, and one geek-speak) is the most unnatural verbiage I've seen in while. How do they expect people to take them seriously? Not to mention the idea of releasing something alpha. If I were them, I would've called myself "Answers to your questions.com" By the way, I feel compelled to copyright 2006 and reserve the use of "Answers to your questions" in relation to search engines, if it hasn't been done already.

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