Pete Whitelock wrote:
>...Engineers who try to build useful artefacts
>might reasonably expect to build on a sound
>theoretical foundation provided by those who
>claim to be doing scientific study in the area
>concerned. As language engineers, or applied
>linguists, we must be profoundly disappointed
>by the abject failure of Chomskyan linguists to
>make the slightest useful contribution to human
>language technology.
I'm not sure how common this attitude is, so perhaps I'm preaching to the
choir. But do the engineers at Boeing complain that ornithologists haven't
contributed to the design of the 747?
FWIW, I work in computational linguistics. I once wrote a grammar of
English (in an engineer's version of GPSG), and I now work in computational
morphology and phonology. And yes, I have made use of scientific results in
linguistics, including some from MIT. (Although I will admit that the first
ten or fifteen years of work there has been far more valuable to me than the
last ten or fifteen. But that's fine: the earlier work was primarily aimed
at observational and descriptive adequacy, whereas now they're working more
on explanatory adequacy.)
Mike Maxwell
Summer Institute of Linguistics
Mike_Maxwell@sil.org
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