When 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 st

When 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 :-(