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

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at verizon.net
Thu Mar 25 17:27:00 EDT 2010


Very interesting. I wonder what (if anything) this says for the  
conflicts between the linguistics approach to Greek and the old  
school. Some might say that this supports the former, but it could be  
argued that it actually supports the latter, i.e. those students of  
Greek who base their conclusions on a wider personal familiarity with  
the extant literature.

Don Wilkins

On Mar 25, 2010, at 1:04 PM, John M. Linebarger 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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