This journal has a knowledgeable and hardworking editorial board, whose members are listed on the inside front cover of each issue, but for most submissions we also enlist the aid of specialist reviewers outside the editorial board. The Editor of Computational Linguistics would like to express his gratitude to the external reviewers listed below who anonymously reviewed papers for the journal during the preparation of this volume (Volume 31). Their generosity, judicious judgment, and prompt response substantially helped us to publish a journal that both is timely and maintains exacting scientific standards; it is a genuine pleasure to thank them collectively for their dedicated service.

This journal has a knowledgeable and hard working editorial board, listed on the inside front cover of each issue, but for most submissions we also enlist the aid of specialist reviewers outside the editorial board. The Editor of Computational Linguistics would like to express his gratitude to the external reviewers listed below, who anonymously reviewed papers for the journal during the preparation of this volume (Volume 36). Their generosity, judicious judgment, and prompt response substantially helped us to publish a journal that both is timely and maintains exacting scientific standards; it is a genuine pleasure to thank them collectively for their dedicated service.

The Montagovian assumption of “direct surface composition” (Hausser 1984; Jacobson 1996a) requires that all available readings of this kind should arise directly from the combinatorics of syntax operating over the lexical elements and their meanings. However, the grammar of English appears to offer a single syntactic structure for the sentence, in which the subject takes scope over the object, leaving the second reading unaccounted for. The ability of the object to “invert scope” or take wide scope over the subject in the following example is similarly unexplained:

The implementation of collapsed Gibbs samplers for non-parametric Bayesian models is non-trivial, requiring considerable book-keeping. Goldwater et al. (2006a) presented an approximation which significantly reduces the storage and computation overhead, but we show here that their formulation was incorrect and, even after correction, is grossly inaccurate. We present an alternative formulation which is exact and can be computed easily. However this approach does not work for hierarchical models, for which case we present an efficient data structure which has a better space complexity than the naive approach.

This journal has a knowledgeable and hard working editorial board, listed on the inside front cover of each issue, but for most submissions we also enlist the aid of specialist reviewers outside the editorial board. The Editor of Computational Linguistics would like to express his gratitude to the external reviewers listed below, who anonymously reviewed papers for the journal during the preparation of this volume (Volume 34). Their generosity, judicious review, and prompt response substantially helped us to publish a journal that both is timely and maintains exacting scientific standards; it is a genuine pleasure to thank them collectively for their dedicated service.

This journal has a knowledgeable and hard working editorial board, listed on the inside front cover of each issue, but for most submissions we also enlist the aid of specialist reviewers outside the editorial board. The Editor of Computational Linguistics would like to express his gratitude to the external reviewers listed here, who anonymously reviewed papers for the journal during the preparation of this volume (Volume 33). Their generosity, judicious judgment, and prompt response substantially helped us to publish a journal that both is timely and maintains exacting scientific standards; it is a genuine pleasure to thank them collectively for their dedicated service.

hernia 143 Dichorionic triplet pregnancy 428 Diethylstilbestrol 128 Diffuse chorioangiomatosis 183 Diode 33 Doppler sonography 452 -ultrasound 289 -velocimetry 149 Dried blood spots 41 Dystobrevin 29 Early diagnosis 55 Echocardiography, fetal 335 Elevated maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein 18 Emergency 139 Escherichia coli 217

“Everyone knows that language is variable.” This is the bald sentence with which Sapir (1921:147) begins his chapter on language as an historical product. He goes on to emphasize how two speakers’ usage is bound to differ “in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency with which particular forms or combinations of words are used”. I should add that much sociolinguistic and historical linguistic research has shown that the same speaker’s usage is also variable (Labov 1966, Kroch 2001:722). However, the tradition of most syntacticians has been to ignore this thing that everyone knows.1 Human languages are the prototypical example of a symbolic system. From very early on, logics and logical reasoning were invented for handling natural language understanding. Logics and formal languages have a language-like form that draws from and meshes well with natural languages. It is not immediately obvious where the continuous and quantitative aspects of syntax are. The dominant answer in syntactic theory has been “nowhere” (Chomsky 1969:57; also 1956, 1957, etc.): “It must be recognized that the notion ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one, under any known interpretation of this term.” In the 1950s there were prospects for probabilistic methods taking hold in linguistics, in part due to the influence of the new field of Information Theory (Shannon 1948).2 Chomsky’s influential remarks had the effect of killing off interest in probabilistic methods for syntax, just as for a long time McCarthy and Hayes (1969) discouraged exploration of probabilistic methods in Artificial Intelligence. Among his arguments were that: (i) Probabilistic models wrongly mix in world knowledge (New York occurs more in text than Dayton, Ohio, but for no linguistic reason), (ii) Probabilistic models don’t model grammaticality (neither Colorless green ideas sleep furiously nor Furiously sleep ideas green colorless have previously been uttered – and hence must be estimated to have probability zero, Chomsky wrongly assumes – but the former is grammatical while the latter is not, and (iii) Use of probabilities does not meet the goal of describing the mind-internal I-language as opposed to the observed-in-the-world E-language. This chapter is not meant to be a detailed critique of Chomsky’s arguments – Abney (1996) provides a survey and a rebuttal, and Pereira (2000) has further useful discussion – but some of these concerns are still important to discuss. I

This journal has a knowledgeable and hard working editorial board, listed on the inside front cover of each issue, but for most submissions we also enlist the aid of specialist reviewers outside the editorial board. The Editor of Computational Linguistics would like to express his gratitude to the external reviewers listed below, who anonymously reviewed papers for the journal during the preparation of this volume (Volume 34). Their generosity, judicious review, and prompt response substantially helped us to publish a journal that both is timely and maintains exacting scientific standards; it is a genuine pleasure to thank them collectively for their dedicated service.