6 ms·

Impressive. Half the breakthroughs involve Chomsky.

bla2 9y ago
Probably because the author of this article studied Chomsky a lot and others less.
sp332 9y ago
The advisor for my CS degree, a Romanian woman for whom English was a fourth language, pointed out that one of our textbooks had several chapters on Chomsky's generative grammars but never mentioned his name. She said (and I agree) this was most likely due to his politics. I don't doubt that his other views influence how much credit he is or isn't given.
carapace 9y ago
Chomsky's Transformational Grammar is part of the origin story of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
- sp332 9y ago
  NLP in this context refers to Natural Language Processing. Neuro-lingustic programming is a very different thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
  - carapace 9y ago
    Yes, I know, I'm familiar with both "NLP"'s. My point is I think it's a fascinating and historically important fact that Neuro-lingustic programming grew directly out of Chomsky-informed analysis of the communications between therapists and their clients. If you read "Structure of Magic, Vol. I" it's basically using Transformational Grammar to detect missing information in the surface structure of clients' statements in a therapeutic context. ----- I've got to say that that wikipedia article is one of the very few that I have encountered that badly misrepresents its subject. I have direct experience of NLP. I would describe it as the operating system of the human mind. I don't really know what to make of the idea that it "has been discredited as a pseudoscience by experts" except that they must not have been very good experts.
    - sp332 9y ago
      Oh, crazy. Ok, thanks.
    - klmr 9y ago
      > I don't really know what to make of the idea that it "has been discredited as a pseudoscience by experts" The Wikipedia article actually does a fairly good job of listing the evidence for this claim (further down). In particular, they show polls of the lack of acceptance by experts within the field of psychology. So the best you could say is that it’s a fringe theory. Furthermore, several claims of the original creators very directly contradict established biological facts (treating physiological ailments such as near-sightedness or the common cold). This obviously casts suspicion on the rest of the theory.
jules 9y ago
Not really, only the definition of context free grammar.
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  "Not really, only the basis of the entire business."
  - jules 9y ago
    It's a good contribution but don't exaggerate it. Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive. Peano rigorously defined natural numbers but Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem is a tad more impressive. The parsing contribution of figures like Knuth is orders of magnitude more impressive. I see that above you state "Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes". This is just not the case. The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy. Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong, but fortunately his work is applicable to parsing computer languages. That's it. He certainly doesn't belong on a list that Einstein "maybe" belongs to.
    - jeffmcmahan 9y ago
      "Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic theory while knowing very little about it. The vast majority of those working on phonology do so within the mold set by Chomsky & Morris Halle in 1970, and there are roughly zero syntacticians doing serious work on natural language syntax outside the Chomskyan tradition (whether in GB or Minimalism). "The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy." You're hardly in a position to judge, with no more than a passing acquaintance with psych 101 summaries of his work. "Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive." The Chomsky hierarchy was not "defined" in the deflationary sense that you're pushing. Chomsky discovered that generative mechanisms partake of a special set of related properties relating the range of their output to specific constraints on the formalisms that can exactly describe their grammars. It so happens that this discovery made possible much that happened in CS during the 60s and into the 70s. I'll leave aside your bizarre comments as to the unimpressiveness of Peano arithmetic.
jeffmcmahan 9y ago
Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes: Newton, Darwin, Smith, maybe Ricardo, Marx, maybe Frege or Russell, Einstein, Turing, Keynes, Chomsky, and a scant few more. His politics may motivate people to disregard him, but mostly he's just come to the devastating conclusion (for solid reasons) that people working on language outside the Chomskyan tradition are not doing science; semantics, linguistic anthropology, and some areas of psychology are just wind. People who do such work will not understand his criticism because their academic standing depends on their not understanding it. There is thus a supply of motivated PhDs ready to dismiss and de-emphasize his contributions. Some of the same applies to philosophers who work on language.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Although oddly, Chomsky seems more important for computer languages than natural languages? The most successful machine translation systems don't use Chomsky's grammars. But their compiler's parser probably does. More: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
  - jeffmcmahan 9y ago
    As the article you linked says of Chomsky's view (correctly), "Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science." Chomsky wants to know how your brain does things, and not how best to make a computer do something to approximate that. He reiterated to me and a few others in 2009, during a seminar, that right from the start he always said that the only way to do machine translation is brute force statistics -- but back in the 50s he took the funding for translation research, and then just did whatever he wanted with it.
- Froyoh 9y ago
  And Knuth!
  - jeffmcmahan 9y ago
    Haha, yes, perhaps. "I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing---so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961." - Knuth
vlmlee 9y ago
I was listening to some lecture and they were talking about there being really only two modes of thought - through pictures and/or through words. Imagine being the one to break down one whole class of thought into a formal discipline.

bla2 9y ago

Probably because the author of this article studied Chomsky a lot and others less.

The advisor for my CS degree, a Romanian woman for whom English was a fourth language, pointed out that one of our textbooks had several chapters on Chomsky's generative grammars but never mentioned his name. She said (and I agree) this was most likely due to his politics. I don't doubt that his other views influence how much credit he is or isn't given.

carapace 9y ago

Chomsky's Transformational Grammar is part of the origin story of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

sp332 9y ago
NLP in this context refers to Natural Language Processing. Neuro-lingustic programming is a very different thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
- carapace 9y ago
  Yes, I know, I'm familiar with both "NLP"'s. My point is I think it's a fascinating and historically important fact that Neuro-lingustic programming grew directly out of Chomsky-informed analysis of the communications between therapists and their clients. If you read "Structure of Magic, Vol. I" it's basically using Transformational Grammar to detect missing information in the surface structure of clients' statements in a therapeutic context. ----- I've got to say that that wikipedia article is one of the very few that I have encountered that badly misrepresents its subject. I have direct experience of NLP. I would describe it as the operating system of the human mind. I don't really know what to make of the idea that it "has been discredited as a pseudoscience by experts" except that they must not have been very good experts.
  - sp332 9y ago
    Oh, crazy. Ok, thanks.
  - klmr 9y ago
    > I don't really know what to make of the idea that it "has been discredited as a pseudoscience by experts" The Wikipedia article actually does a fairly good job of listing the evidence for this claim (further down). In particular, they show polls of the lack of acceptance by experts within the field of psychology. So the best you could say is that it’s a fringe theory. Furthermore, several claims of the original creators very directly contradict established biological facts (treating physiological ailments such as near-sightedness or the common cold). This obviously casts suspicion on the rest of the theory.

jules 9y ago

Not really, only the definition of context free grammar.

jeffmcmahan 9y ago
"Not really, only the basis of the entire business."
- jules 9y ago
  It's a good contribution but don't exaggerate it. Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive. Peano rigorously defined natural numbers but Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem is a tad more impressive. The parsing contribution of figures like Knuth is orders of magnitude more impressive. I see that above you state "Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes". This is just not the case. The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy. Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong, but fortunately his work is applicable to parsing computer languages. That's it. He certainly doesn't belong on a list that Einstein "maybe" belongs to.
  - jeffmcmahan 9y ago
    "Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic theory while knowing very little about it. The vast majority of those working on phonology do so within the mold set by Chomsky & Morris Halle in 1970, and there are roughly zero syntacticians doing serious work on natural language syntax outside the Chomskyan tradition (whether in GB or Minimalism). "The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy." You're hardly in a position to judge, with no more than a passing acquaintance with psych 101 summaries of his work. "Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive." The Chomsky hierarchy was not "defined" in the deflationary sense that you're pushing. Chomsky discovered that generative mechanisms partake of a special set of related properties relating the range of their output to specific constraints on the formalisms that can exactly describe their grammars. It so happens that this discovery made possible much that happened in CS during the 60s and into the 70s. I'll leave aside your bizarre comments as to the unimpressiveness of Peano arithmetic.

jeffmcmahan 9y ago

Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes: Newton, Darwin, Smith, maybe Ricardo, Marx, maybe Frege or Russell, Einstein, Turing, Keynes, Chomsky, and a scant few more. His politics may motivate people to disregard him, but mostly he's just come to the devastating conclusion (for solid reasons) that people working on language outside the Chomskyan tradition are not doing science; semantics, linguistic anthropology, and some areas of psychology are just wind. People who do such work will not understand his criticism because their academic standing depends on their not understanding it. There is thus a supply of motivated PhDs ready to dismiss and de-emphasize his contributions. Some of the same applies to philosophers who work on language.

skybrian 9y ago
Although oddly, Chomsky seems more important for computer languages than natural languages? The most successful machine translation systems don't use Chomsky's grammars. But their compiler's parser probably does. More: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  As the article you linked says of Chomsky's view (correctly), "Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science." Chomsky wants to know how your brain does things, and not how best to make a computer do something to approximate that. He reiterated to me and a few others in 2009, during a seminar, that right from the start he always said that the only way to do machine translation is brute force statistics -- but back in the 50s he took the funding for translation research, and then just did whatever he wanted with it.
Froyoh 9y ago
And Knuth!
- jeffmcmahan 9y ago
  Haha, yes, perhaps. "I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing---so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961." - Knuth

vlmlee 9y ago

I was listening to some lecture and they were talking about there being really only two modes of thought - through pictures and/or through words. Imagine being the one to break down one whole class of thought into a formal discipline.