Markov.py

[Carel Fellinger]

Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
> "Carel Fellinger" <cfelling at iae.nl> wrote in message
> news:94l59e$4kc$1 at animus.fel.iae.nl...
>     [snip]
>> Funny, in those days I was more into Montague Grammers and Natural
>> Language Machine Translation (mainly on the implementation side of a
>> very formal approach under the guidance of Jan Landsbergen).  We used
>> to look with dedain to people using stochastic models in the field:)

> Yep, I remember the debates!-)  The little fact that our
> approach *WORKED* (allowing a 20,000-word vocabulary real
> time recognizer to be first built in 1984), of course,

Impressive! (I take it it did single words only, and I guess it needed
training to get a good profil of the speaker, but still impressive)

> only made the barbs & disdains from the Theoreticians
> more bitter and envenomed:-).  [That's also when I started

Yep, proven wrong what else was there left for them to do:)

But if I remember correctly, the use of frequency analysis to
recognize spoken words was not what was criticised at all. We (the
members of the Rosetta team) felt a bit awkward by the claim that
stochastic models were better suited to attach meaning to (written)
natural language and even to weed ambigueties.  Grammars, on the other
hand, are soo crisp and clear, hence easy to understand:) Probably had
to do with some defect in our minds; I for one never grogged Perl, yet
with Python it was love at first sight.



-- 
groetjes, carel