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Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

theatlantic.com

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Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#51

Post by Retric »

iandanforth wrote: post #29
barrkel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language ? It certainly makes me doubt language (the technology of it) as purely cultural and learned.

Language is a set of behaviors Behavior for humans and other animals requires a brain and body (almost always) The organisation, growth, and function of the brain and body are influenced by genetics. So we can say first and formost that language is influenced by genetics. Having a tongue, vocal chords, hands, ears. These all help to acquire language. So now the question is to what degree does genetics influence langu…

What's really fascinating is wild chimps use a rich form of communication that's far from an actual language. But, they can be trained use complex sign langue which they will then use to communicate with each other. So, language may have developed fairly rapidly relative to the underlying biology.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#52

Post by confluence »

reso wrote: post #48
confluence wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's built into our genetics at a very fundamental level. I'm sorry - but when did Chomsky get a degree in biology or neuroscience.

Chomsky's work has been cited by many papers in both fields.

Citation needed. Which papers and of what importance?

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#53

Post by reso »

iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1960s. Compiler theory incorporates a huge amount of his work. Calling his contributions negligible or detrimental is like saying Freud's contributions were the same.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#54

Post by duaneb »

Retric wrote: post #47
mjn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory, and was the first to propose many widely-used constructs, such as the context-free grammar. They may or may not explain how English works, but pretty much everythin…

Language theory predates Chomsky. The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[6] So, while Chomsky is famous his actual contributions are far less than you might suppose.

I don't think he was claiming that Chomsky IS language theory, or even that he pioneered the field. However, to say his contributions to science are "negligible" is absurd.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#55

Post by duaneb »

Cacti wrote: post #42
confluence wrote: post #40

Noam Chomsky irritates me here's why - he's vague, so astonishingly vague that he can hide his uselessness within it. > Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might study the dance made by a bee returning t…

In which way is he vague? He basically reinvented a Turing Machine with human language and brought linguistics around to the idea that, yes, language isn't something that's vaguely "out there" tabula-rasa-style, it's built into our genetics at a very fundamental level. Fundamental enough that he tied linguistics DIRECTLY to math and from there to programming. The Chomsky Heirarchy is no joke. Your link relating to st…

> it's built into our genetics at a very fundamental level.

Chomsky's evidence for this is.... iffy at best. Yes, I think we are predisposed to HAVE language, but I don't think we can learn as much as he proposes about the structure of modern language from the human genome.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#56

Post by mjn »

Retric wrote: post #47
mjn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory, and was the first to propose many widely-used constructs, such as the context-free grammar. They may or may not explain how English works, but pretty much everythin…

Language theory predates Chomsky. The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[6] So, while Chomsky is famous his actual contributions are far less than you might suppose.

Possibly a linguistic (hah!) confusion. I don't mean that he pioneered the study of language, i.e. linguistics. Clearly people have been studying languages for millennia. When I say he pioneered formal language theory, I mean it in the computer-science sense, that he pioneered the study of formal languages. That's the theory of how to mathematically and computationally parse sequences of tokens into semantic meanings. Chomsky wasn't the first there, since work in symbolic logic (e.g. Frege's work) also considered the formal syntax/semantic mapping. But much modern work in parsing and related areas is derived from Chomsky's work. Any programming-language researcher has heard of and likely used the concept of a "context-free grammar" for example, which Chomsky originated. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

Put more simply, I'm saying that he did valuable scientific work in developing his formal analysis of grammars, even if it fails to capture human language. He intended it to capture human grammar, but it's an interesting computation-amenable model of grammar even if it isn't how humans speak, because it is pretty much how we now write programming languages. When computer scientists today talk about "grammars", for example someone saying that they're writing "an ANTLR grammar for Clojure", they mean it in the Chomskian sense.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#57

Post by MichaelGG »

reso wrote: post #53
iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1960s. Compiler theory incorporates a huge amount of his work. Calling his contributions negligible or detrimental is like saying Freud's contributions were the same.

Could you elaborate on Freud? I thought the general consensus was that none of his "theories" were accurate and evidence doesn't support or it directly contradicts his ideas. From the admittedly little I've read, it comes off as just "making stuff up" and generating frameworks that can explain anything (hence nothing). Psychoanalysis certainly has no place in modern psychology.

Or are you saying that Freud, despite being entirely wrong, got things moving and eventually helped folks to start taking psychology as a serious science? Or another point I am not understanding?

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#58

Post by rdtsc »

iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental.

I think it would be nice to have some more references or more explanation before declaring Chomsky detrimental to science.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#59

Post by brendano »

mjn wrote: post #18
iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory, and was the first to propose many widely-used constructs, such as the context-free grammar. They may or may not explain how English works, but pretty much everythin…

> > His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. > I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory

Chomsky did great work for CS (and NLP) through formal language theory, but his work in linguistics -- in particular, his anti-empiricism and hostility to statistical views of language -- was very unhelpful for getting computers to understand language. See e.g. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#60

Post by jvm »

reso wrote: post #53
iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

Chomsky revolutionized linguistics in the 1960s. Compiler theory incorporates a huge amount of his work. Calling his contributions negligible or detrimental is like saying Freud's contributions were the same.

CogSci PhD student here, I'm no fan of Chomsky but I'd still say his contributions were a lot more useful than Freud's. Freudian Psychology is mostly abandoned by practitioners at this point; the Chomsky hierarchy is still canon in CS.
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