Geoffrey Sampson

Geoffrey Sampson (born 1944) is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.Geoffrey Sampson
University of Sussex staff bio page.
He produces annotation standards for compiling corpora (databases) of ordinary usage of the English language. His work has been applied in automatic language-understanding software, and in writing-skills training. He has also analysed Ronald Coase's "theory of the firm" and the economic and political implications of e-business.

Career

Sampson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the British Computer Society and the Higher Education Academy.Geoffrey Sampson
personal website.
He is also a Chartered Information Technology Professional. He holds three MA degrees, one each from Cambridge, Yale, and Oxford. After graduating from St. John's College, Cambridge, he went on to Yale, conducting research in the Linguistics and Engineering & Applied Science departments. He was awarded a doctorate by Cambridge under the special regulations; his published work was deemed to comprise "a significant contribution to scholarship".PhD by Special Regulations
Board of Graduate Studies, Cambridge University.

His academic career has included work in Asian languages, linguistics, and computing, with side interests in philosophy, and political and economic thought. He lectured at the London School of Economics, the University of Lancaster and the University of Leeds before moving to Sussex in 1991.

Sampson is widely known for academic papers criticising the linguistic nativist movement, including the arguments of proponents such as Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Sampson critically engaged with Pinker's 1994 book ''The Language Instinct'', in his own book '' The 'Language Instinct' Debate'', the first edition of which, published in 1997, was entitled ''Educating Eve''.

Political activities

Sampson is politically active and was elected to Wealden District Council in 2001, serving until 2002 with the local Conservative Party branch. He resigned this position after he was criticised by Labour Party and Liberal Democrat ministers and councillors for publishing on his website an article, ''There's Nothing Wrong With Racism (Except the Name)'', containing a number of racist claims. The outcome was subsequently endorsed by Conservative Central Office as "in the best interests of all concerned ...the Conservative party is opposed to all forms of racial discrimination". Some time later he left the Conservative Party and in 2006 joined the United Kingdom Independence Party.Life
official website

Selection of publications

;Monographs
* ''The Form of Language'' (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975)
* ''Liberty and Language'' (Oxford, 1979)
* ''Making Sense'' (Oxford, 1980)
* ''Schools of Linguistics: Competition and Evolution'' ( Hutchinson, 1980)
* ''Writing Systems'' (Anchor Brenton Ltd., 1985)
* '' Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate'' ( Continuum, 1997)
* ''Empirical Linguistics'' ( Continuum, 2001)

;Essays
* "From central embedding to corpus linguistics" in ''Using Corpora for Language Research'' (Longman, 1996)

;Articles
* "What was transformational grammar?" '' Lingua'' 48 (1979): 355–78.
* "Popperian language-acquisition undefeated". ''British Journal for the Philosophy of Science'' 31 (1980): 63–67.
*
* "Depth in English grammar". ''Journal of Linguistics'' 33 (1997): 131–51.
* "Grammatical depth: a rejoinder". ''Computational Linguistics'' 25 (1999): xx–xx.
* "Briefly noted – English for the computer: the SUSANNE corpus and analytic scheme". ''Computational Linguistics'' 28 (2002): xx–xx.
* "Word frequency distributions". ''Computational Linguistics'' 28 (2002): xx–xx.
* "The myth of diminishing firms". ''Communications of the ACM'' 46 (2003): xx–xx.
* "A test of the leaf-ancestor metric for parse accuracy" '' Natural Language Engineering'' 9 (2003): xx–xx. ith Anna Babarczy* "Definitional, personal, and mechanical constraints on part of speech annotation performance". '' Natural Language Engineering'' 12 (2006): xx–xx. John M Carroll)">John M. Carroll (information scientist)">John M Carroll)
;Reviews
* Steven Pinker, ''Words and Rules'' for ''Times Higher Education Supplement'' 12 May (2000): 22–23.

References

External links

Geoffrey Sampson
— staff bio page @ official University of Sussex website

Geoffrey Sampson
— personal website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sampson, George
1944 births
Academics of Lancaster University
Academics of the University of Leeds
Academics of the University of Sussex
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
Linguists from England
Living people
People educated at Bristol Grammar School
UK Independence Party people
Conservative Party (UK) councillors
Councillors in East Sussex
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University