文章基本信息

标题：On a Common Fallacy in Computational Linguistics
本地全文：下载
作者：Mehryar Mohri ; Richard Sproat
期刊名称：SKY Journal of Linguistics
印刷版ISSN：1456-8438
电子版ISSN：1796-279X
出版年度：2006
卷号：19
期号：SPECIAL
出版社：The Linguistic Association of Finland
摘要：The question of the computational complexity of natural language has attracted many linguists, formal language theory experts, mathematicians, and computer scientists over the last few decades. To determine the complexity of language, researchers have pointed out various complex morphological or syntactic constructions. But, the arguments used to infer from these observations a particular complexity, in particular the position of a language in Chomsky’s hierarchy, are often fallacious. Although this point has been noted many times, such arguments continue to flourish in the literature and even in some computational linguistics courses. The arguments share the same property and depend upon the same common fallacy. While in some cases it is possible to provide a correct formal proof of the complexity of a language, in many cases, the constructions in question cannot be used to demonstrate anything about the complexity of that language. Nonetheless, even in such cases, there is a core intuition underlying the arguments that may be interesting. We remind readers of the common fallacy and sketch how such constructions should be presented and exploited in a rigorous way.