[B-Greek] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: An Argument for a Large Corpus Size (i.e., Reading WIdely)

Eric Inman eric-inman at comcast.net
Thu Mar 25 16:24:49 EDT 2010


This is clear and makes sense.

Another direction I go with this is that it seems to me that a lot of the
issues that are discussed here and in B-Hebrew are ones which will not have
a satisfactory answer until enough statistical analysis can be done. We have
valuable opinions from people who are experts and have done a lot of reading
but it is often hard for them to give definitive answers based on something
other than their personal impressions and a sample of texts that they can
site. It would be interesting if one of these statistics-based translators
not only gave a better translation but also could explain why one
translation was preferred over another.

Eric Inman

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of John M. Linebarger
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 3:04 PM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: An Argument for a
Large Corpus Size (i.e., Reading WIdely)

OK, this one may seem to be coming out of left field, but let me make my
case.  Here is a URL to a paper called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
Data" in IEEE Intelligent Systems.  Each of the authors works for Google.
"What in the world does that have to do with B-Greek?", you may be
wondering.  Well, a theme of the paper is that in a world characterized by
enormous amounts of data, more traditional rule- or heuristic-based
approaches to translation or semantics are being replaced by statistical
ones, which perform much better.  In other words, in the presence of
absolutely huge amounts of data, correlations become amenable to
probabilistic solutions.

To me, this provides yet another confirmation of Carl's constant dictum that
in order to know Biblical Greek well, one must read widely *outside* of
Biblical Greek.  In other words, the bigger the corpus as the context in
which to understand Biblical Greek, the better.  In this argument, the human
becomes the probabilistic information processor, and does increasingly
better pattern matching and statistical correlations as the corpus size of
Greek that has been read increases.  Rules may bootstrap the process, but
the context of a huge corpus trumps rules with statistics.

Clear as mud?  Make any kinda sense?  Thoughts?  Blessings!

John M. Linebarger, PhD
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13863110/The-Unreasonable-Effectiveness-of-Data
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