"It's my understanding that machine translation started to become semi-useful after abandoning traditional grammars (or anything Chomsky would recognize) and sw

"It's my understanding that machine translation started to become semi-useful after abandoning traditional grammars (or anything Chomsky would recognize) and switched to statistics." The same thing happened in speech recognition. IBM started throwing statistical modeling and horsepower at the speech recognition problem, and folks like Kurzweil thought it was inelegant and not "true" speech recognition. However, it serves the purpose, and we know that humans use similar tricks when listening to augment pure recognition. It's harder to hear someone in a loud room if you can't see their mouth, or don't know the context of what they're saying.