Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI

Just because you chose Markov chains as your modeling mechanism doesn't mean that there is no statistical modeling method that is capable of developing something passing for what we'd call "meaning".

This is the same argument that was used against artificial neural networks. Neural network of type A can't do X, therefore neural networks will never do Y.

Language is immensely complex, and real human language involves things which are not encoded in text (and i'd remind you that you were trying to infer meaning from text specifically, not the full multi-channel robustness of humans communicating), we don't even have a full handle on what all of the cognitive processes and factors are that go into the production and understanding of language (although we've developed a lot of interesting work to those ends).

So hearing folks give up claim that Chomsky is correct because our current tools aren't up to the job is a bit puzzling, because we don't even have a complete understanding of what sort of thing language is or what sorts of things we are as systems which can use language.

Chomsky has opinions (and some facts) about what language is, and we are, but he does not have solid proof to confirm his specific conjectures. Is human language context free? context sensitive? Something else? (Chomsky's minimalist program uses movement along a tree to preserve referentiality and a bunch of junk, alternative syntactic frameworks such as HPSG uses directed graphs as the basis of their language modeling. Still others do weirder things like higher order combinatoric logics. And unfortunately none of the theoretical frameworks appear to be without their drawbacks)

This strikes me as the old nature vs. nurture debate - trying to determine which human behaviors are hard wired and which are learned. Like most complex questions I don't think there is a single right answer, but my current theory is that humans have more hard wired behavior than most people like to admit. It is precisely because of our language skills that we can rationalize behavior that has it's root cause in the more animal regions of the brain.

To put it another way - most people think they are rational. Most people act irrationally. To me it is animal instinct that is cause of greed, war, social hierarchy, etc. and it is so ingrained in society that we don't question it's root cause which most likely boils down to atavistic tendencies.

Where is eyudkowski when we need him?

I have read most of the language instinct. I get why people find it compelling, but that has little to do with being accurate. My point was his style tends to be convincing vs. his actual evidence being compelling.

PS: Think of it like this A -> B, B -> C therefore A -> C is all well in good most of the time. A -> B .... Y -> Z therefore A -> Z only really works with math, build a chain that long and it's unlikely for all those steps to be accurate.

> It's clear that Chomsky and Universal Syntax has held back the entire field of AI

That may be true, but there is value to understanding language for the sake of language outside the practical goals of improving AI. There is plenty of evidence for parameters playing a role in human language whether or not a parametric implementation of NLP is possible, desirable or necessary. It's certainly true that a statistical approach that bears plenty of fruit in AI applications is going to be very strained to provide anything of value back to linguistics or developmental psychology.