As the article you linked says of Chomsky's view (correctly), "Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science." Cho

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.