@inproceedings{Hirst46,
 author = "Graeme Hirst",
 title = "Limitations of the Philosophy of Language Understanding Implicit in Computational Linguistics",
 year = "2009",
 booktitle = "Proceedings, 7th European Conference on Computing and Philosophy",
 month = "July",
 address = "Barcelona",
 pages = "108--109",
 abstract = "Contemporary computational linguistics (CL) strives to
                 be strongly empirical and not rely on researchers'
                 intuitions.  Yet it relies on intuitions
                 nonetheless: those of the annotators who mark up the
                 data used for training and testing the models that
                 CL develops.  Implicit in this is a philosophy of
                 language understanding in which there is a single
                 linguistic reality, a single understanding or
                 interpretation of a text or of its elements, which
                 is open to native-speaker introspection or
                 intuition.  Hence all competent native speakers of a
                 language (or dialect) will have the same intuition
                 and, barring error or ill-defined annotation
                 requirements, will annotate any given text or any
                 given linguistic element within a text the same way.<P>
                 This implicit philosophy is challenged in two ways:
                 1. Reader-based views of meaning and language
                 understanding: Fish and other postmodernists claim
                 that readers bring their own knowledge and
                 experience to the interpretation of text, which is
                 not necessarily the same as that of the writer or
                 any other reader.  Hence the annotation methodology
                 is useful only if working within what Fish calls an
                 ``interpretive community''.  2. Individual
                 differences in cognitive language comprehension
                 processes: It is well established that there are
                 individual differences in the cognitive processes
                 and strategies of language comprehension and that
                 these can sometimes lead to different
                 interpretations of a text. <P> It's thus not a surprise
                 that CL often finds itself with relatively low
                 inter-annotator agreement on its marked-up data, and
                 systems whose performance is mediocre when trained
                 with or tested on this data.  CL needs to recognize
                 the limitations of its implicit philosophy of
                 language understanding and aim instead for systems
                 that are more-explicitly adapted to the individual
                 user -- sytems in which aspects of language that are
                 subject to notable individual differences are indeed
                 modelled on an individual basis.",
  download = "http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Hirst-ECAP-2009.pdf"
}