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I don't understand why you're trying to make this an "us vs. them" thing. What is it about academia that makes it so that Google's research can't be considered

by orijing 16y ago

I don't understand why you're trying to make this an "us vs. them" thing. What is it about academia that makes it so that Google's research can't be considered a part? Does the fact that there are students around somehow make it different? Perhaps I was being unclear with "...in nature". I meant that it was academic in origin, and still much of the work is academic. I did not claim that Google has not contributed, but that I was defending the community against a misconception that Google invented/developed something that is partially the work of NLP academics. Re-read my comment please. In particular: The premise of this article--that Google developed the speech-recognition technology--hurts my feelings (to say the least) and underestimates the contributions of the NLP community. They publish papers like "Stupid Backoff" [1], but that makes them as much a contributor as any other member of the NLP community. I am not saying that Google has not contributed to speech. I am arguing that the premise of the article, that Google DEVELOPED the technology, is misleading and insulting. As for science vs. technology: NLP is very systems and technology heavy. If you haven't done much NLP research, you might think that it's very theoretical. No, it's very much about how to stuff a larger language model in memory, how to take an NP-hard decoding problem and produce a linear time approximation algorithm (decoding), how to take an optimization problem of multiple parameters and optimize over them computationally, etc. I agree there is a distinction between science and technology, but to argue that NLP in the academic world is also not "largely technological" is misleading at best.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
Perhaps I was being unclear with "...in nature". I meant that it was academic in origin, and still much of the work is academic. Right, and I'm wondering why you don't consider Google's work to be academic? I'm trying to nail down your definition of "academic". Is there something about Google's work that is qualitatively different? Is is simply that it's not performed on the campus of a school? Beyond the scope of NLP, suppose we're discussing two chemists. One works at, say, Merck, while the other works at a university (perhaps on a grant from Merck). What's the difference between the work that the two are doing? EDIT: in the interest of not being snarky, I may as well come out and say it: your comments gave me every impression of an elitist attitude.
- orijing 16y ago
  Ah, I meant academic, as in "came out of a university." Sorry I left that unclear. I wasn't saying it was "qualitatively different," but that it did not develop speech recognition. It was the work of many, MANY brilliant people, and to say Google developed it would be avoiding so many details. The same with the chemists. There's nothing inherently different simply because of the fact that they work at different places. Suppose chemist at university develops chemical A for some process X and chemist at Merck develops chemical B for the same process X. Both are equal contributions; certainly it would be wrong to say that chemist 2 solved process X. Is that more sensible?

by orijing 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago

Perhaps I was being unclear with "...in nature". I meant that it was academic in origin, and still much of the work is academic. Right, and I'm wondering why you don't consider Google's work to be academic? I'm trying to nail down your definition of "academic". Is there something about Google's work that is qualitatively different? Is is simply that it's not performed on the campus of a school? Beyond the scope of NLP, suppose we're discussing two chemists. One works at, say, Merck, while the other works at a university (perhaps on a grant from Merck). What's the difference between the work that the two are doing? EDIT: in the interest of not being snarky, I may as well come out and say it: your comments gave me every impression of an elitist attitude.

orijing 16y ago
Ah, I meant academic, as in "came out of a university." Sorry I left that unclear. I wasn't saying it was "qualitatively different," but that it did not develop speech recognition. It was the work of many, MANY brilliant people, and to say Google developed it would be avoiding so many details. The same with the chemists. There's nothing inherently different simply because of the fact that they work at different places. Suppose chemist at university develops chemical A for some process X and chemist at Merck develops chemical B for the same process X. Both are equal contributions; certainly it would be wrong to say that chemist 2 solved process X. Is that more sensible?