41–48 of 48 posts
> KINGDOM OF SPEECH is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech — not evolution — is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. It's time to read the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel once more. That's always been a fascinating story for me ... the notion that people were forming a real or virtual tower that threatened divine order and so needed to be split by making their spe…
How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
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I don't know anything about AI or machine learning, but your comment reminded me of this: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html HN discussion of related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4290604
That essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.
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That essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.
Norvig's essay references Chomsky literally talking about "trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems", which is surely what today's search engines do.
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That essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.
On the other hand, if your idea of "the nature of language" doesn't include how listeners understand a statement then you are probably not thinking about the nature of language.
If you are a hacker who is interested in linguistics, you might want to check out the work we are doing at my startup Ozora Research ( http://ozoraresearch.com ). Our goal is to build high-quality, sophisticated NLP solutions for "cleantext" : text that has been professionally written and copy-edited, so that it doesn't have obvious errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. What makes our work different is that,…
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As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
I mentioned in another comment that linguistics is a multi-paradigmatic field, with different paradigms having different conferences and professional networks. this is the consequence: generative linguists are increasingly out of step with the field as a whole, and yet satisfied with the level of research, publications, &c.
How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
No, this has nothing to do with his political views. Chomsky's work is still seen as something of a foundation of modern linguistics and it's still taught in basic classes at university. It's also been very seminal in that it's brought about a vast array of models and theories that build upon it, including modern models such as the various phrase structure grammars (HPSG for instance). However, the world of linguisti…
Not sure where you're getting that from. Which aspects of Chomsky's recent work do you think are drive by some kind of desire to keep up with developments in NLP?
>his models, which in turn have grown vastly more complex over the years compared with his original simple and elegant x' theory
X' theory was not really 'original'. It was first introduced in Remarks on Nominalization in 1970. The models have not in fact grown vastly more complex. In a number of respects quite significant simplifications have been achieved (e.g. the reduction of large numbers of construction-specific transformational rules to a small number of generalizations about A and A' movement).