114: Computational Linguists

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Computational Linguists

Title text: Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.

Explanation

Here Black Hat is criticising computational linguistics, which overlaps between various field like theoretical linguistics, artificial intelligence, etc. Linguistics itself is still a hotly debated subject, as is seen by the various conflicting theories on the origin of languages like the forms of Proto-Indo-European language.

The joke in the comic is that Black Hat, instead of trying to poke fun at angsty emo kids, decides to poke fun at computational linguists for their attempts to model natural languages on computers using the various contradictory theories that are floating around nowadays. He may be associating the two groups, suggesting that their cries of "[their] fields being so ill-defined..." has similarities to emos constantly crying about how "people don't understand them, really" (or he may just be taking a swipe at people who think themselves above normal scientific methods).

The title text is a reference to some of the people who contributed to language theory:

• Noam Chomsky is an influential American psychologist and linguist who, based on cross-cultural studies, proposed a still-disputed theory that the human brain is unique from that of other species in that it includes a fundamental Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that is pre-programmed with basic rules of grammar and syntax: thus, language is innate to humans.
• Generative linguistics is a term within linguistics that is used in several ways, some of which are contradictory. This may be why it is chosen as a target by Black Hat.
• Ryan North is the author of the webcomic Dinosaur Comics, and has a degree in computational linguistics.

Transcript

[Black Hat is standing next to a large badge which says FUCK Computational Lingustics]

Black Hat: And the dumbest thing about emo kids is that... I... You know, I'm sick of easy targets. Anyone can make fun of emo kids. You know who's had it too easy? Computational Linguists. "Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!"

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Discussion

Why Ryan North? 108.233.253.211 21:49, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

First of all, Ryan North happened to specialize in computational linguistics in his masters degree. He was mentioned because he was a computational linguist. On a side note, Ryan North's father was called Randall (though he was not the Randall whose comics this wiki explains). This may have somehow influenced Ryan's name appearing on this list.--Commarchinin (talk) 12:44, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

It may also be a joke on Ryan's webcomic name: "Dinosaur Comics" 121.44.164.207 09:52, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Don't particle physicists have the same issue: string theorists, Bohmians, Many-worldsians, Copenhagen-interpretians, all-possible-pathians, etc.? Djbrasier (talk) 02:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Having multiple theories and models is literally what makes science science in any field, as mentioned above physics is the same. 172.70.110.231 23:45, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Even though this comic was made in jest, I actually think old-school computational linguists' days are numbered, with their complicated theoretical models outperformed by softmax(QK^T/sqrt(d_k))V. "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up." Perhaps computational linguists are the new easy target? Phlaxyr (talk) 03:36, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

This is interesting in light of GPT though... 172.71.22.39 02:56, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Chomsky was wrong about genetic grammar, but he broke the politically correct blockade against analyzing grammar at all. Up to his time, linguists thought it was somehow racist to examine the grammar of a language, because it's the grammar that varies in quality, and they wanted all peoples to be seen as the same. — Kazvorpal (talk) 18:37, 29 January 2024 (UTC)