Mourning ambiguity
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From Phineas Q. Phlogiston, "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics, Part ж—The Trouble with NLP", Speculative Grammarian, CLIII(4), March 2008:
This is only the second cartoon about computational linguistics that I know of. The first one is also rather negative, but I guess that this is only to be expected from cartoonists, who are on the whole much more likely to criticize something than to praise it.
Dr. Phlogiston's article also contains several panels that will be of great value in the classroom, for example this one:
Update — Eli Bishop writes:
Thanks for the computational linguistics cartoons. The phrase that my {artificial intelligence} teacher liked best as an example of {phrases to {confuse {computers with no common sense}}} was "plastic cat food can cover". I'm not sure where it came from, but it's cited along with "pretty little girls' school" by the creators of Lojban, when they discuss all the terrible problems Lojban is supposed to solve.
I don't have that one in cartoon form, but I did find it in physical form (in only one of its meanings, alas) here.
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