I have been enjoying the discussion. I hope it will continue. I have learnt some new things. I was also confused about the tensor thing, although not in the same way.
I hope I am not among one of the scare quoted NLP practitioners, because that's exactly what I like to call myself. I certainly don't think I am qualified to work on language just because I can speak one. I am currently reading your thesis and trying to digest it. I also glanced through the syllabus you are preparing. I share your interest in text encodings. among other things. I can't resist talking about text encodings, whether I am teaching NLP or Computer Programming, because I know first hand the problems in doing NLP for low resource languages which are related to text encodings. If you can actually teach that syllabus, I envy you as I am unable to get people interested in the very basics of language/linguistics. About the importance of granularities, I had, in my (very badly written) PhD thesis, explicitly talked about NLP problem formulation in terms of granularities. In my second research paper, I had used byte n-grams for language identification. I use byte n-grams whenever I can. Actually, I used it for language-encoding pair identification, as there are so many non-standard 'encodings' which were used and perhaps are still used for South Asian languages. My very first -- unsuccessful or you may say unfinished -- attempt at doing some kind of NLP even before knowing that a field called NLP or CL existed, was on building an encoding converter that will work for all 'encodings' used for Indian languages. I too wish there was a good comprehensive history text encodings, including non-standard ad-hoc encodings. I also share your interest in word level language identification. In 2007 I had published one of the earliest papers on what I called language identification in a multilingual document, where I had tried word level language identification, and what is now called language identification for code switched data. About gender, I had actually made a kind of category assumption. I didn't pay attention to the name, which you share with no less than Ada Byron. We have to be tolerant of what you call bad research for various unavoidable reasons. Research is not what it used to be. At least that's my opinion. Still, in some ways it is better, perhaps like in the case of gender representation. About grammar, I have come to think of it as a kind of language model for describing some linguistic phenomenon. I once received a review in which the reviewer mentioned some grammatical mistakes and wrote that you don't have to just see how the sentence/phrase sounds, you have to explicitly check the grammar according to the rules. Thank you very much, but I learnt English without paying any explicit attention to grammar. I am pretty sure I didn't learn much from explicit teaching of grammar, whether of English, or of Sanskrit, or of French.That doesn't necessarily mean I don't believe in grammar, but I guess I am moving towards the language games view of language. As to language being magical, well, that depends on what you mean by magical. To me, it seems it is magical in the same sense as life itself is magical. Nothing more, nothing less. Even computer programming I have been known to call magical in a certain sense. I also completely agree that we can only hope that we are communicating as we intended, but we rarely, if ever, actually attain that goal. I can't match your background, but I did have -- what can be called -- four rounds of graduate training in different disciplines. I am still trying to learn new things about language. However, I have no experience of field work at all and that I regret, but it is partly because I am not a social creature, or, to be more precise (as if one can be precise with language), I am socially totally incompetent. I wouldn't know how to approach anyone for fieldwork in Linguistics. On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 9:03 PM Ada Wan via Corpora <corpora@list.elra.info> wrote: > @Toms: > for completeness' sake: would you mind please sharing your background? > Thanks. > > On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 5:31 PM Ada Wan <adawan...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Thanks x2, Ibrtchx. >> >> On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 3:30 AM Albretch Mueller <lbrt...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> On 8/3/23, Toms Bergmanis <toms.bergma...@tilde.lv> wrote: >>> ... >>> >>> I, for one, have benefited from Ada's, as well as other member's >>> suggestions and comments as I hope they have somehow benefited from >>> mine. >>> lbrtchx >>> >> _______________________________________________ > Corpora mailing list -- corpora@list.elra.info > https://list.elra.info/mailman3/postorius/lists/corpora.list.elra.info/ > To unsubscribe send an email to corpora-le...@list.elra.info > -- - Anil
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