I am taking Ling566, Introduction to Syntax for Computational Linguistics, at the University of Washington as part of a Master’s program in Computational Linguistics. The course is taught by Dr. Emily Bender who is also the director of the program.
This week Emily was introducing how feature structures are used to create a grammar description for English. A big part of the grammar is the syntax portion, how words are formed into phrases and phrases are joined into sentences. Feature structures are a way of adding detail to a grammar so that things like agreement can be accounted for.
As part of her lecture she said, “There is no magic in syntax.”
What she means by this is that when specifying the grammar using feature structures, all of the details have to be specified. If something is left out of the definition, then the grammar will not work correctly.
A statement that is similar to this that I am fond of repeating is “It does exactly what you tell it to.” What is meant by this is that the computer is a machine that executes the instructions given to it – it executes them faithfully. When a program runs correctly and performs the desired actions without any negative side effects, this is because the program was written that way. And just the same, when a program crashes and you lose your data, this is because the instuctions in the program have been arranged in a way that makes it crash.
At any rate, I am thoroughly enjoying taking classes at UW. It is a thrill to be spending all of my time focused on CL.
