[B-Greek] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: An Argument for a Large Corpus Size (i.e., Reading WIdely)
Sarah Madden
sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
Thu Mar 25 16:27:15 EDT 2010
Absolutely, John, you have hit the bullseye. I help grad students who, in
many cases, only read the translation assignment, and never venture outside
into the bigger world -- like using the GNT for one's personal devotions,
for example. The grammar rules then become practical. I like your connection
to IEEE (many of my best friends are engineers -- and members of IEEE).
Sarah ><>
aka
Maryland
On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 4:04 PM, John M. Linebarger <jmlineb at comcast.net>wrote:
> 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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--
Sarah ><>
sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
work: 301.429.8189
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