Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: A Challenge to the Minimalist Community |
| Submitter: | John Goldsmith |
| Description: | Just a brief comment on a remark made by Ash Asudeh:
"All grammars, those used in statistical parsing or otherwise, attempt to reject ungrammatical sentences: Nobody wants their grammar/parser to overgenerate. Even if the claim is true of statistical parsers (I don't think it is), it certainly isn't true of the LFG and HPSG parsers and grammars noted above." That's not quite right. There is not universal agreement to the position that the ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences is an important function to be able to model directly, whether we are looking at humans or at software. There are certainly various serious parsing systems whose goal is to be able to parse, as best they can, any linguistic material that is given to them -- and arguably, that is what we speakers do too. I think of Microsoft Research's NLPWin parser as an example of such a system. Needless to say, the disagreement about this point brings into play a lot of very serious questions, and I think both sides of the question I mentioned take reasonable positions -- but my point here is to emphasize that Ash Sudeh's point represents one side of an issue, not both sides. |
| Date Posted: | 05-May-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1432 |
| Posted: | 05-May-2005 |
