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I think you are misinterpreting the quote. He meant that experts (computational linguists and statisticians) had a firmer grasp of the task of inference in lang
by glup 8y ago
I think you are misinterpreting the quote. He meant that experts (computational linguists and statisticians) had a firmer grasp of the task of inference in language than linguists, who tend to care more about formal structure (i.e. Chomsky's competence/performance distinction) and are less aware of problems like overfitting. If anything, it's stressing the importance of domain expertise, just suggesting that who those experts are may be nonobvious.
- DougMerritt 8y agoThanks for explaining. I would then say that a quote that actually means the opposite of what it appears to mean is a stupid quote for other reasons. Even with the explanation, it still comes across more as blaming the linguists than the people who assigned the wrong people to the wrong tasks. (Why are they fired rather than reassigned? Why were they ever hired if they're the wrong specialty and aren't needed elsewhere?)