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Everyone on the panel is quite senior -- the comments have the flavor of "darn young researchers these days." It might be interesting to hear from AI researche
by brendano 15y ago
Everyone on the panel is quite senior -- the comments have the flavor of "darn young researchers these days." It might be interesting to hear from AI researchers under 40 about this.
Second, on the question of statistics and language; there's an excellent Fernando Pereira essay which addresses, among other things, Chomsky's old opposition to statistical theories: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf
- _delirium 15y agoThat's an excellent paper; thanks for the pointer. I think it correctly notices that a lot of both sides have been talking past each other lately, because the old 50s/60s oppositions aren't quite there anymore. In some ways, Chomsky's critique is obsolete, but that's in part precisely because Chomskyian ideas have now been taken up in the statistical community, in ideas like grammar induction. ML is now willing to study grammar models higher up the Chomsky hierarchy than the simple Markov-chain models they investigated in the 50s, which does owe something to Chomsky's studies in formal grammar (like the existence of the Chomsky hierarchy), even if Chomsky himself has been slow to notice that they have indeed taken up some of his ideas.