Linguistics Meets Linux: A Review of Morphix-NLP
Emre Sevinc writes "Zhang Le, a Chinese scientist working on Natural Language Processing has decided to pack the most important language analysis and processing applications into a single bootable CD: Morphix-NLP. More than 640 MB of NLP specific software is included and there's still a lot of place on the CD which uses a compressed filesystem for bringing us the best of both worlds."
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New version? Got this after some googling
http://www.forum2010.org/
While right on this probably not being of much help to the typical anthropologist, it's not at all true that most of the software has lots of built in domain knowledge.
At least half the tools are general purpose applications for constructing various kinds of models, whether they be trees or HMMs or n-gram models or entropy models.
Believe it or not a lot of NLP work gets done on understanding algorithms that apply broadly across languages.
There is some English specific stuff on the CD, but most of it isn't.
The only software
There is no talk of linguistics complete without mentioning Chomsky's political diatribes. :)
:) )
He pretty much defined linguistic theory for the past 40 years. Once he had a voice he turned into somewhat of a political critic. A conspiracy-theorist. I don't see him solving any political problems, and I don't know how well respected he is by those who study such things, but I think he's a loon. (But, oh god, I wish I could study with him.
Chomsky's papers are tough to comprehend for beginners. (Which I am.) Those who are interested in learning Chomskian theory may wish to pick up some Andrew Radford. (he is very understandable, and his book "Transformational Grammar" is aimed at the undergraduate level syntax class. Once you tackle that, you can read Haegemann, "Government and Binding," which seems to be the most used graduate level book... but this one is quite boring.)
In the meantime, a linguistic glossary which may help you get through some of the papers you may find: http://tristram.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/
http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~prrodrig