How the statistical revolution changes (computational) linguistics

  • Authors:
  • Mark Johnson

  • Affiliations:
  • Brown University

  • Venue:
  • ILCL '09 Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on the Interaction between Linguistics and Computational Linguistics: Virtuous, Vicious or Vacuous?
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper discusses some of the ways that the "statistical revolution" has changed and continues to change the relationship between linguistics and computational linguistics. I claim that it is more useful in parsing to make an open world assumption about possible linguistic structures, rather than the closed world assumption usually made in grammar-based approaches to parsing, and I sketch two different ways in which grammar-based approaches might be modified to achieve this. I also describe some of the ways in which probabilistic models are starting to have a significant impact on psycholinguistics and language acquisition. In language acquisition Bayesian techniques may let us empirically evaluate the role of putative universals in universal grammar.