

Some of my Best Friends are Linguists (2004) [pdf] - sushirain
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/doc/jelinek.pdf

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sushirain
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"

~~~
82xx
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.

~~~
sushirain
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

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

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

~~~
indubitably
To do what?

