Reactions to reactions so far

Many thanks to the folks who have posted to the blog! (Others: please follow suit!) There are two different but related threads here that are interesting. One stays closer to the "Colorless green ideas" dialogue; that's less about learning, per se, than about the role of probabilistic models in understanding questions linguists care about. There's lots of good discussion to be had there, but I'm not going to head that way right now; I'd just strongly endorse Tim's reminder that folks should read Abney's 1996 chapter, and I'd add Pereira's "...Together Again?" (which hopefully folks have read by now) and also Chris Manning's chapter in the Probabilistic Linguistics volume.

The second thread has more to do with what the course is about and how we can best make it valuable to people. I may have already solved this problem simply by letting other folks teach for a couple of weeks. :-) But let me take up the "hammers and nails" discussion. I do agree that an "If you build it, they will come" mentality may be a bit unrealistic for (linguistic) scientists, as opposed to engineers -- that was my philosophy in developing and deploying the Linguist's Search Engine, for example, but beyond an existence proof that it can be genuinely useful to honest-to-God linguists and psycholinguists (see my BLS paper from a few years back), my goal of helping linguistic theoreticians get more data-driven proved wildly optimistic. As has been pointed out in some of the reaction pieces here, but with slightly different phrasing, a community is more likely to adopt new techniques when they fit a "requirements pull" (what hammers might help with this damned nail?) than when they arise via a "technology push" (here's a cool new hammer, wonder what it's useful for?).

That said, here are two reasons we've been visiting the hardware store to browse the hammer section. The first is analogous to why (from my perspective) we did a seminar about computation and language last year. The idea of computation is central to what linguists (often say they) care about, and there's a whole discipline devoted to really, really understanding what computation is about, that linguists should be aware of, if by "computation" they really mean what they think they mean. Analogously, the entire program of Chomskian linguistics (I loved the idea of "UMDian" linguistics, by the way) is defined by the problem of learning, and there's a whole discipline devoted to really, really understanding the idea of learning in a formal, systematic way. It may be useful or at least entertaining to see the conceptual connections between the fields.

The second reason runs counter to the "nail first" philosophy. There are lots of good reasons to focus on the problems people want solved and find solutions to them; in business, for example, the "solution selling" approach is all about finding the customer's pain and giving them what they need to solve it. But there's a catch: often customers only think they know what they need. Sometimes introducing something new solves pain customers didn't even know they had; and sometimes the "something new" isn't even being used the way it was originally intended!

My favorite example: Was Google designed to compete with bookmarking in Web browsers? Heck, no. Browser developers were driven by the problem of users wanting to keep track of pages they'd visited, and "bookmarks" seemed like a good solution to the problem. But then search got good enough that the page you want often comes up on the first page of hits, especially for "known item" searches where you can generate a very effective query,. Today, lots of people (including me) use browser bookmarks very little, if at all. It's faster and easier just to type a query into Google.

Anyway, bottom line in an already too-long post: I agree that it would be good for the class to involve more discussion of the nails that linguists need hammered, related to learning, no question. I need people's help to address that issue and I'm open to suggestions. At the same time, I'm hoping that people will take the time not only to understand the ideas that are being presented, but also to actively brainstorm and discuss their relevance to issues you care about.