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