Practice question · True or false
Machine translation and speech recognition improved mainly by encoding more hand-written grammatical rules.
Hints
- Think about what changed in these fields from the 1990s onward.
- The gains came from statistical models trained on large corpora.
Show the answer
False
Why
False, and the reversal is instructive. Decades of hand-written rules were overtaken by statistical and then neural models trained on very large corpora. That says something real about language, a great deal of what speakers know is distributional rather than rule-shaped, and it is one reason corpus evidence gained standing in the wider field.
Practise The Branches and What They Are For
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Languages I is free to start.
More questions on The Branches and What They Are For
- Why does Labov's department-store study show that variation is structured rather than random?
- About half of the world's roughly 7,000 languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers.
- Which are legitimate reasons for documenting an endangered language?
- Sort each activity by whether it is primarily DESCRIPTIVE research or an APPLICATION of linguistics.
- Approximately how many living languages are there, to the nearest thousand?
- Arrange the stages of a language documentation project in order.
- Linguistic subfields are distinguished by evidence rather than subject matter. What follows from this…