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I had the exact same reaction to this article. Either they've poorly reported on the project, or the project investigator is hoping to make what would be a quan
by jnbiche 9y ago
I had the exact same reaction to this article. Either they've poorly reported on the project, or the project investigator is hoping to make what would be a quantum leap in the state of the art. I am extremely skeptical that this will provide any kind of actionable disaster relief language materials at any time in the next 5 or even 10 years.
It's fine and worthy to do this kind of research as basic research, but to market it (and fund it?) as some kind of "developing countries/disaster relief" project seems borderline deceptive.
- glup 9y agoRegarding your second point, #grantsmanship. Unfortunately it's quite hard to get funding for basic research without arguing it will help (=health intervention, diagnostics) or hurt (=help kill the bad guys, or at least manage them). Regarding your first point, this isn't so nutty. Bayesian approaches to PCFG induction are getting increasingly sophisticated. It's not grammar identification in the limit, it's coming up with a probabilistic linguistic representation that improves your predictions (all models are wrong, these are just more useful than having no expectations regarding linguistic structure).