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<Paper uid="C88-2095">
  <Title>General Comments Computational linguistics (CL) has borrowed a lot of ideas from</Title>
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General Comments
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Computational linguistics (CL) has borrowed a lot of ideas from Theoretical Linguistics (TZ). We could not have developed even a simple parser without the research results in TL. It is obviously nonsense to claim that we, computational linguists, do not care research results in TL.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> llowever, the researchers in TL, it seems to me, are very fond of fighlinq~ especially, those who are called Synlaclicians. They always fight with e~h other by asserting that their grammar formalisms are superior to the others'. They are oversensitive and tend to distinguish people into two groups, the ally and the enemy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> A computational linguist using LFG (or pseudo LFG) as a small part in his total system is taken as the ally of LFG, and is certainly accused by the other groups. They promptly demonstrate that LFG is wrong, by showing a lot of peculiar sentences which rarely appear in real texts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We are tired of listening to such discussions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The Reasons Why Formalisms are prepared for accomplishing specific purposes. The formalisms in TL have been proposed, roughly speaking, for describing the rules of distinguishing grammatical word sequences from arbitrary ung~ummaticalsequences, and of relating the grammatical sequences with the other representational levels. On the other hand, a formalism we need in CL is for differeat purposes. That is, we need a formalism for describing the rules of distinguishing the most feasible grammatical structures from other less feasible but still grammatical ones of the same sentences \[Disambiguation\]. We also lined a formalism in which we can manage systematically a large amount of knowledge of various sorts necessary for NLP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Formalisms for different purposes, of course, should be evaluated based on different standards. The current discussions of diffhreut formalisms in TL are irrelevant to our standards, though they may be important for their fights. The following is a list of the reasons why I think so.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> (1)\[Small and Peculiar Examples\]: Linguists Mways argue that their formalisms are better than others by using almost the same set of peculiar sentences. This implies that the differences of the formalisms are revealed only in these types of sentences which rarely appear in real texts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> F~lrthermore, it often happens that all of the proposed formalisms can capture the same regularity. They only claim that their for.malisms capture it more elegantly than others, elegantly accord-ing to their standards.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> (2)\[Meaning and Knowledge\]: The elegance of their formalisms is obtained partly by ignoring uninteresting phenomena, again uninteresling according to their standards. Especially, they ignore largely phenomena related to meaning, extra-ling~tistic knowledge, contexts, etc. Or they ignore them by claiming that they are related to these factors.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> (3)\[Disambiguation\]: Linguists can ignore the uninteresting phenomena, but CL researchers developing actual systems can..</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> not. The systems have to cover wide ranges of phenomena which really appear in texts. Furthermore, disambiguation, which is the hardest problem in CL but not at all in TL, certainly requires considerations in the factors which syntacticians ignore.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> I fear that lhe elegance of their \]ormalisms becomes a serious obstacle ~o the introduction of such extra factors and processinga on them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> (4)\[Management of Grammar Descriptions\] : l also fear that their elegance becomes an obstacle to the systematic develop.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> meat and management of grammar descriptions. Grammar descriptions here include the descriptions of both rules and dictionaries. Some formalisms are claimed eleganl in the sense that they require only very few rules. But this elegance is obtained by very complicated dictionary descriptions. The standards ibr being elegant seem different in TL and CL. * (5)\[Processing Issues\] : The grammar formalisms ignore rnostly the processing issues. Linguists do not care processing issues in their formalisms just as we do not care grammar formalism.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> Conclusion I have to repeat here that I do not claim that TL research is irrelevant to CL. I only claim that grammar formalisms are not important. What is important is in their discoveries which are described by their formalisms. And what we have to do is to describe their discoveries in our own formalisms.</Paragraph>
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