The Balancing ACT: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language

By Ian C. Anderson

Book Overview

Symbolic and statistical approaches to language have historically been at odds - the former viewed as difficult to test and therefore perhaps impossible to define, and the latter as descriptive but possibly inadequate. At the heart of the debate are fundamental questions concerning the nature of language, the role of data in building a model or theory, and the impact of the competence-performance distinction on the field of computational linguistics. There is an increasing realization in both camps that the two approaches have something to offer in achieving common goals.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262112183
• ISBN13: 9780262112185
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 186 Pages

Customer Reviews

get it for Abney's classic paper

This volume is worth it for the opening paper, Steve Abney's brilliant "Statistical methods and linguistics". Reading this paper in Chris Manning's statistical NLP class at CMU changed the way I think about the field. I believe it should be required reading for *linguists*. In my experience, most computational linguists either don't care about mainstream theoretical linguistics, have evaluated it and dismissed it as useless,...