brendano

This is on a slightly different statistical methodology issue, but quoting from Brad Efron (http://statweb.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005BayesFre...):

The physicists I talked with were really bothered by our 250 year old Bayesian-frequentist argument. Basically there’s only one way of doing physics but there seems to be at least two ways to do statistics, and they don’t always give the same answers.

This says something about the special nature of our field. Most scientists study some aspect of nature, rocks, stars, particles; we study scientists, or at least scientific data. Statistics is an information science, the first and most fully developed information science. Maybe it’s not surprising then that there is more than one way to think about an abstract subject like “information”.

For example: this classic paper on compression http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee398a/handouts/papers/WittenA...

was published with a C, Unix-based implementation (I put it here http://brenocon.com/WittenNealCleary-ArithmeticEncodin-cacm-...)

which compiles and runs fine (just lots of compiler warnings) on modern Linux and OS X, 18 years later.

These things also intersect ... for example, you'd have to figure out how dialectical English verbal auxiliaries like "finna", or the second or so word in "imma", map to PTB tags. It's possible but just takes more work and thinking through the descriptive linguistics and what you want to use it for. Someday I'd like to update the whole thing for a more PTB-like POS tagset, if it can be done well. I feel like Chris Manning's whitepaper on issues in PTB POS data convinced us (well, it convinced me, at least) that it might be a good idea to focus on making high quality tag annotations. (http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/CICLing2011-manning-tagging.pdf )

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...