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So what? Who says the training data has to be perfect? Your comment reminds me of an essay by Peter Norvig. Where he showed that a simple statistical model coul

So what? Who says the training data has to be perfect? Your comment reminds me of an essay by Peter Norvig. Where he showed that a simple statistical model could tell the difference between a nonsense sentence that was grammatically correct and one that wasn't, but gave them both very low probability of occuring naturally. Similarly, the machine may learn that "Give him the flowers" has higher probability than "give him flowers". Or it may learn that both are possible sentences and not be able to correct it. Which is also OK, we can't expect any system to be perfect.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
You're talking about the grammatical, but nonsensical sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" proposed by Chomsky, along with its ungrammatical counterpart, "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless." [1] Chomsky famously said that one of the two sentences is ungrammatical, but both would be assigned a low probability by a statistical model trained on English corpora. The one who showed that the ungrammatical sentence was (much) less likely than the grammatical one was Fernando Pereira, not Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig has argued against Chomsky in a different instance, and cited Pereira during that (one-sided) exchange, if memory serves. This is completely unrelated to what I'm saying, of course. The fact of the matter is that you can't just swap some words out of a sentence and call it "ungrammatical". You can call it a "perturbed" sentence. You can call it a "sentence with some words dropped". You can call it Daisy Duck for all I care. But it's not an ungrammatical sentence, because that sort of thing has a very precise definition, which I gave above. _______________ [1] The sentence is famous enough to have a wikipedia page all its own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

You're talking about the grammatical, but nonsensical sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" proposed by Chomsky, along with its ungrammatical counterpart, "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless." [1] Chomsky famously said that one of the two sentences is ungrammatical, but both would be assigned a low probability by a statistical model trained on English corpora. The one who showed that the ungrammatical sentence was (much) less likely than the grammatical one was Fernando Pereira, not Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig has argued against Chomsky in a different instance, and cited Pereira during that (one-sided) exchange, if memory serves. This is completely unrelated to what I'm saying, of course. The fact of the matter is that you can't just swap some words out of a sentence and call it "ungrammatical". You can call it a "perturbed" sentence. You can call it a "sentence with some words dropped". You can call it Daisy Duck for all I care. But it's not an ungrammatical sentence, because that sort of thing has a very precise definition, which I gave above. _______________ [1] The sentence is famous enough to have a wikipedia page all its own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...