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As somebody who used to do a bit of NLP work in the dim and distant past I can testify that Chomsky's work on context free grammars, etc. (certainly used to any
by adrianhoward 14y ago
As somebody who used to do a bit of NLP work in the dim and distant past I can testify that Chomsky's work on context free grammars, etc. (certainly used to anyway - not been poking at it for about fifteen years now) got applied a fuck of a lot.
The model probably doesn't have a great deal of relation to what happens inside folks heads - but it was stupidly useful for making computers do stuff though. Might be better techniques now - I don't know. But saying that it wasn't applicable practical work is basically ignoring the NLP stuff that was happening in the 80's and 90's.
(let alone the more obvious useful stuff for us geeky folk - the formal grammar stuff we use and think about for compilers. Chomsky Hierarchy, etc.)
- mturmon 14y agoAmen. And, I'm not enough of a historian of science to know, but it seems to me that the basic results Chomsky proved on Regular Languages and CFGs paved the way for the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that have been so effective in language understanding. Basically, the HMMs are the natural probabilistic extension of Regular Languages. I'm not sure if Viterbi and the other developers of the basic HMM toolkit were directly influenced by Chomsky, or if state machines were just in the air. Certainly Chomsky's basic work in the late 1950s predated Viterbi's work in the 1960s.