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The article said LLMs make Chomsky incorrect about how humans learn language. I posted quotes of his indicating that isn't true. Because it isn't true. It's ab
by AndyNemmity 3y ago
The article said LLMs make Chomsky incorrect about how humans learn language.
I posted quotes of his indicating that isn't true. Because it isn't true. It's absurdly obvious it isn't true.
Everyone replying is talking about other things instead of the topic. LLMs have added zero to the learning about how humans learn language.
They've added other value.
- jameshart 3y agoThe article actually doesn't say that LLMs are causing us to rethink human language acquisition. It says that LLMs are causing us to rethink whether Chomsky's universal grammar is a good candidate for a necessary substrate for language acquisition. For example, it says: > Universal grammar enthusiasts have long argued that no other biological species can have language that has grammar and recursive composability, because they don’t have universal grammar. That seems like a reasonable characterization of the universal grammar viewpoint as I understand it, and the existence of models which have acquired impressive language skills without a universal grammar substrate - by using instead a vast quantity of input data - certainly calls that view into legitimate question. It may be that Chomsky believes that he never said the universal grammar was the ONLY way to acquire language, but a lot of computational linguistics research in the Chomsky school certainly took that as an assumption. An assumption that the success of statistical modeling with no universal recursive grammar substrate certainly calls into question.