Jokes about Computational Linguists

As you might know I am a Computational Linguist myself and so -- though I don't like taking a defensive stance -- I feel inclined to drop some words.

So what's the message? Well, if you visit the original cartoon you will notice that I somewhat cropped it, i.e. the ``Fuck Computational Linguists''. Sigh, yeah. Not, that Computational Linguists don't fuck. Maybe he just missed a comma somewhere like in ``Fuck, Computational Linguists'' (thanks for the advice) or ``Fuck computational, Linguists'' (how bizarre) ...

The other more substantial part of the cartoon says that the field of Computational Linguists was ``ill-defined''. In fact, Computational Linguists know quite well that given a room of n CLs there are n+m (m>0) opinions. So the field is highly contradictory not only among scientists but also everybody him/herself. Is this a weakness? Definitely no. If you meet someone who is strong enough to revise his angle given he followed one school for ages with quite some evangelism, then you are a lucky one because those scientists are rare. Most follow their track for ages not accepting what goes on to the left and to the right, taking all of their youngers with them. Hard facts and plain numbers are ignored just because it does not fit into the picture. If it happens that people come up with contradictory models and these get discussed and compared then this is good. I don't have to elaborate on that, I think.

``Ill-defined'', this also subsumes something like ``fragmented''. As said the field of CLs is fragmented in the way that there is a huge variety of models and methods at a first glance, which is good. What is bad -- and that's fragmentation too -- is the fact that Computational Linguists find themselves in the more broader area of Cognitive Science where we have all sorts of overlapping research going on that is much more connected to each other than we would like to modularize research. Neuroscience, Psycholinguistics, Philology, Anglistics, Theoretical Linguistics, and so on. And most of them stay in their camp, albeit they share the same object of interest: your blabla machine between your shoulders. That's not supprising because the material is very hard to get within one span of life, progress made very slowly. Some may even say there is a crisis of disorientation while overcoming Chomsky.

So maybe Computational Linguists are all loony because they contradict one another and themselves all the time but how about you: you talk talk talk all day. Did you wonder anytime why you say what you say, why you (don't) understand what someone tries to tell you, why you talk differently than you write, how this speech and language thingy can happen to work out at all? Probably not. For you, language is a natural given. You emit it. And electricity comes from of outlets in the wall.