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I like to think of Summers73 as the future of linguistics.
Flattery will get you everywhere.
CL is not my primary research area, but I do know Ray Mooney, Dan Jurafsky, James Lester, and a host of others who have helped shape the future. Of course, Noam was nowhere to be seen at the conference I speak of, which is one of the top worldwide conferences for this area (look it up and observe the roster, you'll see what I mean). Wasn't speaking, wasn't even present. Probably too busy pleasuring himself to pictures of Mao.
I am no fan of Chomsky. I don't agree with most of what he says on global politics, history, and many other subjects. However, I took an advanced writing course in college, and quite a bit of the material which the professor used quoted Chomsky on sentence construction and related topics.
I am no fan of Chomsky. I don't agree with most of what he says on global politics, history, and many other subjects. However, I took an advanced writing course in college, and quite a bit of the material which the professor used quoted Chomsky on sentence construction and related topics.
The premise of this thread is very ignorant.
The premise is how is he contributed to linguistics, not his legacy research. He's done NOTHING for the past decade, and very little for the past couple of decades. He's decaying in his ivory tower and not contributing at all to the field, likely just teaching grad students at this point.
"Chomsky has a philosophy based on the idea that we should focus on the deep whys and that mere explanations of reality don't matter. In this, Chomsky is in complete agreement with O'Reilly. (I recognize that the previous sentence would have an extremely low probability in a probabilistic model trained on a newspaper or TV corpus.) Chomsky believes a theory of language should be simple and understandable, like a linear regression model where we know the underlying process is a straight line, and all we have to do is estimate the slope and intercept."
I am no fan of Chomsky. I don't agree with most of what he says on global politics, history, and many other subjects. However, I took an advanced writing course in college, and quite a bit of the material which the professor used quoted Chomsky on sentence construction and related topics.
The premise of this thread is very ignorant.
Personally, I think the thread has some interesting parallels.
For instance, in discussions about global warming, those who are most ardent in their belief that humans are causing distressing warming, argue that the scientists in the field are in agreement and how dare others speak against them. Only those who are “in the knowâ€, or have degrees in the matter should be speaking out and driving policy…
Appeal to authority is a huge argument point of the left on every front. Conservatives are lambasted for not loving education etc. Now we see an example of a guy speaking out of turn but in favor of leftist views and those questioning Chom are ignorant?
Chomsky comes from the old school CL world that says you can map a language simply by overengineering the world environment. Natural language is far too complex and has too many rules/exceptions to be modeled by one global regression model. Researchers have also shown that maintaining such a knowledge base is near impossible.
Chomsky comes from the old school CL world that says you can map a language simply by overengineering the world environment. Natural language is far too complex and has too many rules/exceptions to be modeled by one global regression model. Researchers have also shown that maintaining such a knowledge base is near impossible.
I didn't think Chomsky "came from" the world of computational linguistics in the first place, but correct me if I'm wrong. That his ideas have found their way into CS and compiler courses is incidental, I think, to his work; that wasn't his focus.
I wouldn't be surprised if Chomsky's ideas have been superseded, that's the nature of science.
The currency of his linguistic theories really is neither here nor there, however, in a critique of his credentials for the various things he speaks and writes about. The man is highly intelligent and learned, and has had over 50 years' experience thinking and writing on matters outside of strict linguistics. This doesn't mean his ideas can't be challenged, but it takes more than just "his background is linguistics, not social structures or political theory" or low-information derisive jabs (not accusing you, summers73, of those kind of arguments).
He's studies linguistics, but he only talks about economics, politics, and science, which he has no credentials to show that he has credibility in what he gets paid to talk about.
No offense intended but this is the most naive post I have ever come across. Seriously bro.
Linguistics is the study of the interplay of words and the forces human beings have in the whole of life. How words are employed at tools (Hitler) can influence each of the areas you mentioned.
Chomsky speaks out on all these subjects for obvious reasons as the words and the way they are used greatly influences the way human beings are trained, bought and sold.
Now...........you know. Don't fall off your chair or anything.
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Don't fall off your chair or anything.
