Hello.
Gully Burns wrote this in response to a few unnecessary ad-hominem posts:
/I was shocked to see a vitriolic ad-hominem attack on a colleague
posted to this mailing list. It is entirely inappropriate to post this
type of diatribe against an individual even though someone might
disagree with either the tone or the content of an individual's messages
or arguments. The fact that other members of the community chimed in to
reinforce the attack is also appalling and entirely inappropriate./
I agree with Gully. Ada Wan's posts may be long, and clearly are not to
everyone's liking, but they speak to a phenomenon that is troubling
enough to merit a discussion. Symbolic processing in NLP is utterly
outmoded. Number crunching has taken overcompletely, and linguistic
reflection seems to be considered unnecessary. This may be an opening
for scientific dodginess. Ada advocates, and very reasonably, for good
scientific practice, so one wonders why anyone would be riled up.
This may be my optimism, but the Corpora List may be the best forum that
NLP has today. It is not only a place for announcing conferences and
workshops, and advertising open positions. It is, and it should be, a
place for an exchange of ideas.
--
Stan Szpakowicz, PhD, DSc, Emeritus Professor
EECS, Computer Science, University of Ottawa