[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[Steve Finch]

Hi all,

I would say that on his own terms, Chomsky as quoted is right.  If your goal 
is to produce a theory of the structure of language in terms of the sort of 
theories of syntax that Chomsky pioneered and in the paradigm which he 
introduced, all of which are insightful and great achievements, I have seen 
very little evidence that the sort of study that goes on in corpus 
linguistics has very much insightful to add to that enterprise.

On the other hand, if your goal is different, such as to build machines that 
accurately extract and/or organise information from textual sources for a 
task (let us say, to take an example close to my heart, the profiling of 
candidates for job applications from their CVs), then conversely 30 years of 
endeavour in computational linguistics has shown that the structural paradigm 
that Chomsky pioneered, despite its clear and undenyable insights into the 
nature of the output of the human language processing system, provides very 
little guidance about how to go about constructing such a device.

So it all depends on your point of view.

- Stvee.



On Wednesday 04 July 2007 02:01, Mike Maxwell wrote:
> John F. Sowa wrote:
> > It is truly sad when a man who had taught us all a great deal at
> > one time long ago has walled himself off from any input that might
> > raise questions he had decided to ignore five decades ago.
>
> Let me take the devil's advocate position here, in hopes of provoking
> some discussion.  What is the evidence from corpora that would raise
> these questions, and what are the questions Chomsky is ignoring?
>
> (I think we've all heard the argument that a probability can be
> calculated for 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously' which
> is--contrary to Chomsky's original argument--greater than zero, based on
> the probabilities of the parts.  I'm asking if this, or anything else
> from corpora, would plausibly lead to a different way of viewing human
> language acquisition, particularly of syntax.)

-- 
Steven Finch
Daxtra Technologies
Tel: +44 (0)131 653 1250
Email: s.finch at daxtra.com