Live data from Hacker News

Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

scholar.google.com

11–20 of 244 posts

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#11
I'm betting on learning (both human and ML) being analogous to renormalization in QFT. Essentially, you are trying to explain a process in terms of imperfect patterns. With incoming data, you update both your patterns and your locations where these patterns occur at once.

There is some research into this https://phys.org/news/2022-05-renormalization-group-methods-...

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#12
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

> The fact that you can replicate coherent text from probabilistic analysis and modeling of a very large corpus does not mean that humans acquire and generate language the same way.

Also, the LLMs are cheating! They learned from us. It's entirely possible that you do need syntax/semantics/sapience to create the original corpus, but not to duplicate it.

Let's see an AlphaZero-style version of an LLM, that learns language from scratch and creates a semantically meaningful corpus of work all on its own. It's entirely possible that Chomsky's mechanisms are necessary to do so.

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#13
post #6

While I think some of the points in the article are interesting, the usual evidence for the Chomskian approach is the relative lack of input data for learning language by children in the wild. How much input data is used to train modern language models?

1. No Language model is yet even close to the scale of the human brain

2. Depending on what exactly you're trying to teach (perfect grammar, paragraphs of coherent text, basic reasoning), much less data is needed. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759

3. Brains don't start at 0. Evolution, dna/rna etc. There's obviously some pre disposition for language learning in humans but that alone isn't enough ground for a "universal grammar"

4. We really do take in an enormous amount of data (not text specifically)

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#14
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

> The fact that you can replicate coherent text from probabilistic analysis and modeling of a very large corpus does not mean that humans acquire and generate language the same way. Also, the LLMs are cheating! They learned from us. It's entirely possible that you do need syntax/semantics/sapience to create the original corpus, but not to duplicate it. Let's see an AlphaZero-style version of an LLM, that learns langu…

interesting point!

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#15
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

Wordcels think LLMs imitate the human brain, when a shape rotator knows they really just imitate human language.

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#16
post #9
post #6

While I think some of the points in the article are interesting, the usual evidence for the Chomskian approach is the relative lack of input data for learning language by children in the wild. How much input data is used to train modern language models?

Do children really lack input data though? Human sensory input is quite a lot of data. Our languages may have common structure because that structure reflects causality and physics encountered by directly sampling the real world.

And how exactly is the structure of the world transformed into a structure of language? Chomsky would say through a universal grammar, which is a framework through which you can set up ways to encode the structure in the world as words.

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#17
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

Wordcels think LLMs imitate the human brain, when a shape rotator knows they really just imitate human language.

doesn't this make LLM a dead end towards AGI and mostly just a neat specific trick?

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#18
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

> The fact that you can replicate coherent text from probabilistic analysis and modeling of a very large corpus does not mean that humans acquire and generate language the same way. Also, the LLMs are cheating! They learned from us. It's entirely possible that you do need syntax/semantics/sapience to create the original corpus, but not to duplicate it. Let's see an AlphaZero-style version of an LLM, that learns langu…

>Also, the LLMs are cheating!

No...they aren't. Humans aren't learning from thin air by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#19
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

> The fact that you can replicate coherent text from probabilistic analysis and modeling of a very large corpus does not mean that humans acquire and generate language the same way. Also, the LLMs are cheating! They learned from us. It's entirely possible that you do need syntax/semantics/sapience to create the original corpus, but not to duplicate it. Let's see an AlphaZero-style version of an LLM, that learns langu…

Every human alive is cheating, they learned from us!

Re: Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

#20
post #8

The author (bafflingly) seems to have completely missed the point- since anything they state up to page 15 (at which point I stopped reading) does not refute Chomsky's points at all. The author talks about LLMs and how they generate text and then goes on to talk about how it refutes Chomsky's claim about syntax and semantics. However it does not since Chomsky's primary claim is about how HUMANS acquire language. The…

Thank you! It is like arguing that a human engaging in the creation of a landscape portrait using the traditional method of oil painting has been "refuted" by a computer generating vector graphics from statistical descriptions of the same scene. Both yield art but they are clearly different in interesting ways. Neither refutes or outmodes the other. Or maybe I'm wrong and actually trees have refuted mushrooms!
Post reply on HN