🚀 go-pugleaf

The following is a book which readers of this list might find of interest.
For more information please see
http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/mitp/recent-books/linguistics/klabp.html

_The Balancing Act
Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language_
edited by Judith Klavans and Philip Resnik

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.

Language, Speech, and Communication series.
A Bradford Book
November 1996
140 pp. - 30 illus.
ISBN 0-262-61122-8
$17.50 paper

MIT Press*55 Hayward Street*Cambridge, MA  02142*(617)625-8569