Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up.

In a presentation, Jelinek claimed it was "Whenever I fire a linguist our system performance improves" and it came from a talk "Applying Information Theoretic Methods: Evaluation of Grammar Quality Workshop on Evaluation of NLP Systems", Wayne PA, December 1988. | According to Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Jelinek himself recalled the quote as "Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up" and dated it to December 1988 (Wayne, Pennsylvania), further noting that the quote did not appear in the published proceeding. | Roger K. Moore gave the wording as "Every time we fire a phonetician/linguist, the performance of our system goes up" and dated it to an IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding workshop held in 1985.