The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) [Hardcover]

Judith Klavans (Author), Philip Resnik (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262112183 | ISBN-13: 978-0262112185 | Publication Date: December 6, 1996

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. The eight contributions in this book explore the "balancing act" that must take place when symbolic and statistical approaches are brought together - including basic choices about what knowledge will be represented symbolically and how it will be obtained, what assumptions underlie the statistical model, what principles motivate the symbolic model, and what the researcher gains by combining approaches. The topics covered include an examination of the relationship between traditional linguistics and statistical methods, qualitative and quantitative methods of speech translation, study and implementation of combined techniques for automatic extraction of terminology, comparative analysis of the contributions of linguistic cues to a statistical word grouping system, automatic construction of a symbolic parser via statistical techniques, combining linguistic with statistical methods in automatic speech understanding, exploring the nature of transformation-based learning, and a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to recovering from parser failures.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The statistical and symbolic approaches to language have emerged fromdifferent starting points and methodologies and have tended to focuson different goals. The resulting tension and confusion has obscuredthe fact that both approaches can make crucial and often complementarycontributions to a deeper understanding of how language works. Thepapers in this volume show that this is indeed the case: they carefullyarticulate the theoretical advantages of combining techniques and describea number of concrete experiments that illustrate and support a systhesisof both approaches." Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Judith Klavans is Director of the Center for Research on Information Access at Columbia University. Philip Resnik is an Assistant Professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 202 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (December 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262112183
• ISBN-13: 978-0262112185
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,697,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars get it for Abney's classic paper, December 12, 2001

By 

Bob Carpenter (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) (Paperback)

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, or have taken on Abney's arguments; the remainder use logic and formal language theory without statistics. I considered myself in that remainder before reading this paper.

Abney argues that Chomsky's original motive for setting up the paradigm of generative grammar though intuited grammaticality judgements was a simple expedient that allowed him to apply the mathematics of his day (automata and formal language theory). Abney dispatches "classical" generative grammar with the finesse that Chomsky showed in dismissing behaviorism. Today, information theory (read Cover and Thomas's excellent book) as applied to natural language (read Manning and Schuetze's excellent book) is the paradigm of choice for the mathematically and computationally savvy linguist.

All in all, anyone who is interested in a scientific approach to linguistics should read Abney's paper.