Student writers are often taught that acronyms should also be given in expanded form on first use. While this is a good rule of thumb in my opinion, there is an exception for any acronym whose expansion the author believes to be misleading about its referent, particularly when the acronym in question seems to have been coined after the fact and purely for the creator’s amusement.
“Many such cases.”
An author-date citation may be preferable to spelling out the silly acronym.
The picture of linguistics one can get from books like The Linguistics Wars (Harris 1993) and press coverage of l’affaire du Pirahã suggests it is a quite nasty sort of field, full of hate and invective. Is linguistics really, as an engineer colleague would have it, “unusually vituperative”?
In my opinion it is not, for I object to the modifier unusually. Indeed, while such stories rarely make the nightly news, the sciences have never been without a heft dose of vituperation. For instance, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon was accused, slanderously and at book length, of causing a measles epidemic among indigenous peoples of the Amazon. And entomologist E.O. Wilson had a pitcher of water poured on his head at a lecture because, according to a lone audience member, his research on ants implied support for eugenics. And even gentleman Darwin was not above keeping an ill-tempered bulldog.
Harris, R. A. 1993. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure. Oxford University Press. [I don’t recommend this book: Harris, instead of explaining the issues at stake, focuses on “horse race” coverage, quoting extensively from interviews with America’s grumpiest octogenarians.]
Some of my colleagues have over the years expressed concern their ongoing projects are in danger of being “scooped”, and as a result, they need to work rapidly to disseminate the projects in question. This concern is particularly prominent among the fast-moving (and unusually cargo-cultish) natural language processing community, though I have occasionally heard similar concerns in the company of theoretical linguists. Assuming this is not merely hysteria caused by material conditions like casualization and pandemic-related isolation, there is a simple solution: work on something else, something you yourself deem to be less obvious. If you’re in danger of being scooped, it suggest that you’re taking obvious next steps—you’re engaging in what Kuhn calls normal science—that you lack a competitive advantage (such as rare-on-the-ground expertise, special knowledge, proprietary or unreleased data, etc.) that would help you in particular advance the state of knowledge. If you find yourself in this predicament, you should consider allowing somebody else to carry the football across the goal-line. Or don’t, but then you might just get scooped after all.
There is a standard, well-designed way in which linguists write examples, and failure to use it in a paper about language is a strong shibboleth suggesting unfamiliarity with linguistics as a field. In brief, it is as follows:
A lot of students—and increasingly, given how young the field of NLP is—don’t know how to write numbers in papers. Here are a few basic principles (some of these are loosely based off the APA guidelines):
A few other points about tables with numbers (looking at you LaTeX users):
[This is just a fun thought experiment. Please don’t get mad.]
The other day I had an intrusive thought: the phrase moneyball linguistics. Of course, as soon as I had a moment to myself, I had to sit down and think what this might denote. At first I imagined building out a linguistics program on a small budget like Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. But it seems to me that linguistics departments aren’t really much like baseball teams—they’re only vaguely competitive (occasionally for graduate students or junior faculty), there’s no imperative to balance the roster, there’s no DL list (or is just sabbatical?), and so on—and the metaphor sort of breaks down. But the ideas of Beane and co. do seem to have some relevance to talking about individual linguists and labs. I don’t have OBP or slugging percentage for linguists, and I wouldn’t dare to propose anything so crude, but I think we can talk about linguists and their research as a sort of “cost center” and identify two major types of “costs” for the working linguist:
I think it is a perfectly fine scientific approximation (not unlike competence vs. performance) to treat the linguistic universe as having a fixed amount of cash and carbon, so that we could use this thinking to build out a roster-department and come in just under the pay cap. While state research budgets do fluctuate—and while our imaginings of a better world should also include more science funding—it is hard to imagine near-term political change in the West would substantially increase it. And similarly, while there is roughly 1012 kg of carbon in the earth’s crust, climate scientists agree that the vast majority of it really ought to stay there. Finally, I should note that maybe we shouldn’t treat these as independent factors, given that there is a non-trivial amount of linguistics funding via petrodollars. But anyways, without further ado, let’s talk about some types of researchers and how they score on the cash-and-carbon rubric.
On a more serious note, just so you know, unless you run an MEG lab or are working on something called “GPT-G6”, chances are your biggest carbon contributions are the meat you eat, the cars you drive, and the short-haul jet flights you take, not other externalities of your research.
Strubell, M., Ganesh, A. and McCallum, A. 2019. Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3645-3650.
Don’t take money from the John Templeton Foundation. They backed the murderous Chicago School economists, the genocidal architects of the war on Iraq, and are among the largest contributors to the climate change denial movement. That’s all.
The Sokal affair was a minor incident in which physics professor Alan Sokal published a “hoax” (his term) paper in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that reviewers and editors would approve of an article of utter nonsense so long as it obeyed certain preconceived notions, in this case that everything is a social construct. (It is, but that’s a story for another blog.)
The affair has been “read” many ways but it is generally understood to illustrate poor editorial standards at top humanities journals and/or the bankruptcy of the entire cultural studies enterprise. However, I don’t think we have any reason to suspect that either of these critiques are limited to cultural studies and adjacent fields.
I submit that the Pirahã recursion affair has many of the makings of a linguistic Sokal affair. But if anything, the outlook for linguistics is quite a bit worse than the Sokal story. By all accounts, Sokal’s hoax article was a minor scholarly event, and does not seem to have received much attention before it was revealed to be a hoax. In contrast, when Everett’s article first appeared in Current Anthropology in 2005, it received an enormous amount of attention from both scholars and the press, and ultimately led to to multiple books, including a sympathetic portrait of Everett and his work by none other than the late Tom Wolfe (bang! krrp!). Finally, nearly all of what Everett has written on the subject is manifest nonsense.
I believe many scholars in linguistics and adjacent fields found Everett’s claim compelling, and while I think linguists should have seen through the logical leaps and magical thinking in the Current Anthropology piece, it wasn’t until a few years later, after the exchange with Nevins et al. in Language, that the empirical issues (to put it mildly) with Everett’s claims came to light. But the key element which gave Everett’s work such influence is that, like Sokal intended his hoax to do, it played to the biases (anti-generativist, and particularly, anti-Noam Chomsky) of a wide swath of academics (and to a lesser degree, fans of US empire, like Tom Wolfe). In that regard, it scarcely matters whether Everett himself believes or believed what he wrote: we have all been hoaxed.
I am pleased to be part of the Dec 9 @coling2020 panel "Should GPT3 Have the Right to Free Speech?" with Robert Dale, @emilymbender, and @pascalefung. I expect it to give me lots to think about. The panelists will make only short remarks before open discussion. Current thoughts:
— Christopher Potts (@ChrisGPotts) December 7, 2020
I have some discomfort with this framing. It strikes me as unnecessarily frivolous about some serious questions. Here is an imagined dialogue.
Should GPT-3 have the right to free speech?
No. Software does not have rights nor should it. Living things are the only agents in moral-ethical calculations. Free speech as it currently is construed should also be recognized as a civic myth of the United States, one not universally recognized. Furthermore it should be recognized that all rights, including the right to self-expression, can impinge upon the rights and dignity of others.
What if a court recognized a free-speech right for GPT-3?
Then that court would be illegitimate. However, it is very easy to imagine this happening in the States given that the US “civic myth” is commonly used to provide extraordinary legal protections to corporate entities.
What if that allowed it to spread disinformation?
Then the operator would be morally responsible for all consequences of that dissemination.
…at some very near point in the future, that there’s something inherently white supremacist about teaching and studying generative linguistics. They will never tell you how generative linguistics enforces white supremacy, but they will tell you that it represents a hegemonic power in the science of language (it does not, it is clearly just one way of knowing, spottily represented outside the Angophone west) and that it competes for time and mindshare with other forms of linguistic knowledge (an unexamined austerity mindset). This rhetorical trick—the same one used to slander the socialist left across the democratic West 2016-present—would simply not work on the generative community were they a militant, organized, self-assured vanguard rather than a casualized, disorganized, insecure community, one serously committed to diversity in race and sexual orientation but largely uninterested in matters of class and power. And then, once you’ve accepted their framing, they’re going to sell you a radically empiricist psycho-computational mode of inquiry that is deeply incurious about language diversity, that cares not a whit for the agency of speakers, and trains students to serve the interests of the most powerful men in the world.