3 ms·
The trouble with shrdlu and all the other early "natural language" parsers is that they weren't really parsing natural language. They parsed a formal language w
by Legend2440 6mo ago
The trouble with shrdlu and all the other early "natural language" parsers is that they weren't really parsing natural language. They parsed a formal language with syntax designed to look kinda like English.
At the time it was believed (by Chomsky, etc) that natural language could be described in formal terms and parsed by fixed rules. But after several decades of failed parsers (and the success of statistical methods like LLMs), it is clear that formal and natural are fundamentally different types of languages.
- mcphage 6mo agoWhen I was in college (back in the early 2000s) I took a course on computational linguistics as part of a linguistics degree. And we studied formal language style parsers, and statistical style parsers. And I really didn't like the statistical style parsing—coming from a math background, the formal language style parsing seemed a lot more elegant to me. But damn if the statistical parsing didn't work a lot better :-(