Personally I couldn't see anything wrong with their latest post. It
gives me some idea of the ongoing importance they attach to NLP, which
is interesting. Who cares if what they say is couched in the genre of
their commercial sub-culture, as corpus linguists aren't we supposed to
be especially tolerant of idiosyncratic use?
It's good to see that the considerable funds this big company continues
to have the foresight to spend on NLP are being offered to an audience
of corpus linguists in particular, we should welcome them.
And let's not be rude.
Rob Freeman
Doug Cooper wrote:
> Sorry for taking bandwidth to flame, but...
>
> Is it really necessary for Microsoft's flaks to include such
> lengthy, inarticulate, and self-aggrandising advertisements in
> the job listings they post on Linguist, Corpora, etc? Or is MS
> simply being intentionally droll in making statements like:
>
> >Enabling computers to understand natural language is a difficult
> >and fascinating task.
>
> Didn't Dilbert's boss say that? Or was it in the Junior (age 10-12)
> National Science Fair? And what about:
>
> >Microsoft has amassed some of the top linguists in the world,
> >and the company is creating high quality linguistic features
> >such as grammar checkers, search engines, and eventually
> >machine translation.
>
> Was that the 'before' or 'after' of one of the MS 'high quality
> linguistic features' (presumably not the grammar checker)? And:
>
> >The Natural Language Group (NLG) [blah blah blah] This strategic
> >and growing group is critical for making software easier for
> >customers to use, and is central to the company’s future. Our
> >features ship in all of Microsoft’s key products.
>
> Note the redesigned single-quote 'feature.'
>
> Sigh... flame off,
> Doug