4 ms·

Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? (1997)

18 points by phab 6y ago

phab 6y ago
I see the title has been modified post hoc to include a year.. but it's wrong. It should actually be 1997...
- dang 6y ago
  Fixed. Thanks!
friendlybus 6y ago
The author is working very hard to build an indifference to the self into what is an emotional and psychological meaning to that phrase. Logic and language rules only get you so far removed from desires and romantic realities. I get these attempts are innocent from an american cultural perspective, but paul is not the next colbert. I never get tired of the internal contradictions people rely on to dismiss what is in front of their face. The start of this article declares that the phrase is meaningless and then ends with a fake revelation that the author has defined it's meaning. The author is so determined that the initial reaction is meaningless that we need to read three paragraphs about palming off nature to a language game. Bring back Steve Jobs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
0xddd 6y ago
It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  I couldn't even get through all of the original article. Having said that; and having formally studied linguistics at an undergrad level, "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is different than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in that the former is not grammatical. It is also the case that non-grammatical sentences can have meaning. For example, I believe that most English speaker would agree that the sentence "me happy" is not grammatical, and indicates that the speaker is happy.
  - 0xddd 6y ago
    Right. The sentences are both very unlikely to be uttered even though one is grammatical and the other is not, so there must be another factor in play.
- canjobear 6y ago
  Chomsky was arguing that probability is useless for defining and studying grammaticality. I'm not so sure. GPT-2 says log P("Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously.") = -53.64797019958496 log P("Furiously sleep thoughts green colorless.") = -65.46656107902527 The ungrammatical one is lower probability. But those are famous sentences, and probably present in the training data, so let's try log P("Colorless blue ideas hibernate angrily.") = -60.12953460030258 log P("Angrily hibernate ideas blue colorless.") = -70.02637100033462
  - 0xddd 6y ago
    I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.
    - canjobear 6y ago
      > If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. Yes, Chomsky mentions this in a footnote. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tried with modern language models. There's been some interesting work that tries to reproduce grammaticality judgments in terms of language model probability after controlling for length and lexical content. It turns out it works pretty well. For instance https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf
vilhelm_s 6y ago
In 1985 some students at Stanford organized a competition: > you were asked to compose not more than 100 words of prose, or 14 lines of verse, in which a sentence described as grammatically acceptable but without meaning did, in the event, become meaningful. The sentence, devised by Noam Chomsky, was: colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Four winning entries here: http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html
tempodox 6y ago
> Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? Racter would definitely say so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter
infradig 6y ago
With the rise of the Green Movement the sentence has actually taken on a semblance of meaning.

18 points by phab 6y ago

phab 6y ago

I see the title has been modified post hoc to include a year.. but it's wrong. It should actually be 1997...

dang 6y ago
Fixed. Thanks!

friendlybus 6y ago

The author is working very hard to build an indifference to the self into what is an emotional and psychological meaning to that phrase. Logic and language rules only get you so far removed from desires and romantic realities. I get these attempts are innocent from an american cultural perspective, but paul is not the next colbert. I never get tired of the internal contradictions people rely on to dismiss what is in front of their face. The start of this article declares that the phrase is meaningless and then ends with a fake revelation that the author has defined it's meaning. The author is so determined that the initial reaction is meaningless that we need to read three paragraphs about palming off nature to a language game. Bring back Steve Jobs.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

0xddd 6y ago

It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.

gizmo686 6y ago
I couldn't even get through all of the original article. Having said that; and having formally studied linguistics at an undergrad level, "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is different than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" in that the former is not grammatical. It is also the case that non-grammatical sentences can have meaning. For example, I believe that most English speaker would agree that the sentence "me happy" is not grammatical, and indicates that the speaker is happy.
- 0xddd 6y ago
  Right. The sentences are both very unlikely to be uttered even though one is grammatical and the other is not, so there must be another factor in play.
canjobear 6y ago
Chomsky was arguing that probability is useless for defining and studying grammaticality. I'm not so sure. GPT-2 says log P("Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously.") = -53.64797019958496 log P("Furiously sleep thoughts green colorless.") = -65.46656107902527 The ungrammatical one is lower probability. But those are famous sentences, and probably present in the training data, so let's try log P("Colorless blue ideas hibernate angrily.") = -60.12953460030258 log P("Angrily hibernate ideas blue colorless.") = -70.02637100033462
- 0xddd 6y ago
  I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.
  - canjobear 6y ago
    > If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. Yes, Chomsky mentions this in a footnote. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tried with modern language models. There's been some interesting work that tries to reproduce grammaticality judgments in terms of language model probability after controlling for length and lexical content. It turns out it works pretty well. For instance https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf

vilhelm_s 6y ago

In 1985 some students at Stanford organized a competition: > you were asked to compose not more than 100 words of prose, or 14 lines of verse, in which a sentence described as grammatically acceptable but without meaning did, in the event, become meaningful. The sentence, devised by Noam Chomsky, was: colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Four winning entries here: http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html

tempodox 6y ago

> Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? Racter would definitely say so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter

infradig 6y ago

With the rise of the Green Movement the sentence has actually taken on a semblance of meaning.