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> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it
by mjn 14y ago
> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental.
I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory, and was the first to propose many widely-used constructs, such as the context-free grammar. They may or may not explain how English works, but pretty much everything on the Chomsky hierarchy has been put to productive use in computers.
In a much more general sense, his arguments against blank-slate learning are pretty mainstream in machine learning as well. Chomsky's specific approaches aren't too widely used (though there is some work on grammar induction), but the idea that inductive bias is key to machine learning is widespread, though perhaps in a weaker sense than the very specific and strong inductive bias Chomsky proposes for language learning.
- Retric 14y agoLanguage theory predates Chomsky. The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[6] So, while Chomsky is famous his actual contributions are far less than you might suppose.
- duaneb 14y agoI don't think he was claiming that Chomsky IS language theory, or even that he pioneered the field. However, to say his contributions to science are "negligible" is absurd.
- mjn 14y agoPossibly a linguistic (hah!) confusion. I don't mean that he pioneered the study of language, i.e. linguistics. Clearly people have been studying languages for millennia. When I say he pioneered formal language theory, I mean it in the computer-science sense, that he pioneered the study of formal languages. That's the theory of how to mathematically and computationally parse sequences of tokens into semantic meanings. Chomsky wasn't the first there, since work in symbolic logic (e.g. Frege's work) also considered the formal syntax/semantic mapping. But much modern work in parsing and related areas is derived from Chomsky's work. Any programming-language researcher has heard of and likely used the concept of a "context-free grammar" for example, which Chomsky originated. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy Put more simply, I'm saying that he did valuable scientific work in developing his formal analysis of grammars, even if it fails to capture human language. He intended it to capture human grammar, but it's an interesting computation-amenable model of grammar even if it isn't how humans speak, because it is pretty much how we now write programming languages. When computer scientists today talk about "grammars", for example someone saying that they're writing "an ANTLR grammar for Clojure", they mean it in the Chomskian sense.
- brendano 14y ago> > His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental. > I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory Chomsky did great work for CS (and NLP) through formal language theory, but his work in linguistics -- in particular, his anti-empiricism and hostility to statistical views of language -- was very unhelpful for getting computers to understand language. See e.g. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf