The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) First Edition

by Judith L. Klavans (Editor), Philip Resnik (Editor)

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ISBN-13: 978-0262611220

ISBN-10: 0262611228

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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. Currently, 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 inevitable "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

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"The statistical and symbolic approaches to language have emerged from different starting points and methodologies and have tended to focus on different goals. The resulting tension and confusion has obscured the fact that both approaches can make crucial and often complementary contributions to a deeper understanding of how language works. The papers in this volume show that this is indeed the case: they carefully articulate the theoretical advantages of combining techniques and describe a number of concrete experiments that illustrate and support a systhesis of both approaches."--Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

& quot; The statistical and symbolic approaches to language have emerged from different starting points and methodologies and have tended to focus on different goals. The resulting tension and confusion has obscured the fact that both approaches can make crucial and often complementary contributions to a deeper understanding of how language works. The papers in this volume show that this is indeed the case: they carefully articulate the theoretical advantages of combining techniques and describe a number of concrete experiments that illustrate and support a systhesis of both approaches.& quot; -- Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

" The statistical and symbolic approaches to language have emerged from different starting points and methodologies and have tended to focus on different goals. The resulting tension and confusion has obscured the fact that both approaches can make crucial and often complementary contributions to a deeper understanding of how language works. The papers in this volume show that this is indeed the case: they carefully articulate the theoretical advantages of combining techniques and describe a number of concrete experiments that illustrate and support a systhesis of both approaches." -- Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

-- Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Review

The statistical and symbolic approaches to language have emerged from different starting points and methodologies and have tended to focus on different goals. The resulting tension and confusion has obscured the fact that both approaches can make crucial and often complementary contributions to a deeper understanding of how language works. The papers in this volume show that this is indeed the case: they carefully articulate the theoretical advantages of combining techniques and describea number of concrete experiments that illustrate and support a synthesis of both approaches.

―Ronald M. Kaplan, Research Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Publisher ‏ : ‎ A Bradford Book; First Edition (December 6, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 202 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262611228
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262611220
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

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Bob Carpenter

get it for Abney's classic paper

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2001

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.

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The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) First Edition

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The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language (Language, Speech, and Communication) First Edition

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