> Computational Linguistics I kept running into the unspoken question
I've done a lot of work in NLP and the times when computational linguistics has been useful is very rare. The only time I shipped something to production that used it was a classifier for documents that needed to evaluate them on a sentence by sentence basis for possible compliance issues. Computational linguistics was useful then because I could rewrite mulit-clause sentences into simpler single clause sentences which the classifier could get better accuracy on.
> And here was Google Translate being "good enough" for 80% of all use cases using a "dumb" statistic model that didn't even have a coherent concept of what a language is.
I assume you are aware if Frederick Jelinek quote "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up"?[1]
That was in 1998. It's been pretty clear for a long time that computational linguistics can provide some tools to help us understand language but it is insufficiently reliable to use for unconstrained tasks.
I've done a lot of work in NLP and the times when computational linguistics has been useful is very rare. The only time I shipped something to production that used it was a classifier for documents that needed to evaluate them on a sentence by sentence basis for possible compliance issues. Computational linguistics was useful then because I could rewrite mulit-clause sentences into simpler single clause sentences which the classifier could get better accuracy on.
> And here was Google Translate being "good enough" for 80% of all use cases using a "dumb" statistic model that didn't even have a coherent concept of what a language is.
I assume you are aware if Frederick Jelinek quote "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up"?[1]
That was in 1998. It's been pretty clear for a long time that computational linguistics can provide some tools to help us understand language but it is insufficiently reliable to use for unconstrained tasks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek