How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
I don't know who these people who claim that Chomsky is "wrong" are, but it sounds like coming from some newbies who just finished reading a couple of papers on machine learning, thinking they know the entire field of AI.
From my experience most people who say Chomsky is wrong have in most cases never actually read Chomsky's papers. Trust me it's really hard to finish any of his actual papers, even as someone who majored computational linguistics. I'm pretty sure 99% of people on this thread who are throwing around the term "generative linguistics" casually have no idea what it actually is in detail. Maybe they read some wikipedia article, maybe they watched a 45 minute Youtube video of some famous guy talking about it.
I see it as a same phenomenon as people criticizing that "Blue ocean" theory is wrong, "Black swan" theory is wrong, "Lean startups" theory is wrong, all without actually having read and thought about any of those books and basing their criticism on the shallow knowledge they picked up from blogs, which even I have been guilty of.
My thought: The approach by Chomsky and others in this field may not be in fashion nowadays, but it does provide a significant foundation on top of which many others build their theories. Also for these significant theories there is no "right" or "wrong", the whole point is the theory does exist and it gives us something to think about. Saying Karl Marx was wrong is a foolish thing to say because right or wrong is not what matters. Maybe thousands of years later in the future things may change and communism may end up becoming the perfect ideology for our society then. It's all contextual.
That essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.
On the other hand, if your idea of "the nature of language" doesn't include how listeners understand a statement then you are probably not thinking about the nature of language.
Norvig's essay references Chomsky literally talking about "trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems", which is surely what today's search engines do.
Generative linguistics is pretty isolated these days... chugging along but using a set of methodologies and premises that are pretty far removed from the rest of academia. Generative linguistics generally had trouble in two key areas 1) first language acquisition (where increasingly ornate innate machinery is needed to explain how kids arrive at the 'right' grammar) and 2) language processing, where the structural representations were never great at predicting processing difficulty, nor implementable in a machine. Consequently, these two fields have long been in psychology (and the reason I'm a psych graduate student, of all things!), and draw heavily on statistics cognitive science, NLP and in the latter case, information theory.
Chomsky is brilliant, no doubt, and critically showed the world how much latent structure there is in language. However, he is IMHO pretty wrong in thinking that this latent structure can't be learned (e.g. inferring a probabilistic context-free grammar).
One thing to be said for generative linguistics is that a whole lot of super-interesting phenomena have only been characterized within specific generative frameworks--language documentation and psycholinguistic research can only progress with a formal system in which language can be rigorously characterized. So one of the huge projects in the future will be translating the 50+ years of research into the formalisms in the modern computer science / statistical NLP / Bayesian cognitive science / learning-centric developmental psychology stack.
>a set of methodologies and premises that are pretty far removed from the rest of academia.
The rest of academia has agreed on a set of methodologies and premises? No wonder we feel left out!
>increasingly ornate innate machinery is needed to explain how kids arrive at the 'right' grammar
This is too vague to respond to. But theories do tend to get more complex as we learn more, since there's more data to account for.
>where the structural representations were never great at predicting processing difficulty, nor implementable in a machine.
Which structural representations assumed by (say) GB theory are not implementable in a machine?
>he is IMHO pretty wrong in thinking that this latent structure can't be learned (e.g. inferring a probabilistic context-free grammar).
Chomsky always agreed that it was possible to learn context-free grammars via statistical methods. That's why he placed such a great emphasis in the 60s on showing that context-free grammars are not a suitable model for natural language.
Your last paragraph is fairly astonishing, insofar as it admits that generative linguistics has obtained lots of interesting results which cannot be characterized in "modern" terms. That sounds like a pretty strong indication that generative linguistics has got something right!
> Which structural representations assumed by (say) GB theory are not implementable in a machine?
Most of the individual constraints proposed in the myriad papers on GB and Minimalism are probably implementable by machine. But no one in Chomskyan generative syntax seems interested in explicitly spelling out the full set of principles that would underly a large-coverage grammar--except maybe Steedman's Minimalist Grammar formalism, which is ignored by most people who call themselves "syntacticians". In contrast, the HPSG and LFG communities have attempted to provide large-scale grammars and a lot of NLP work has used them in a serious way, but those communities are no longer very active.
Is there a work which lays out modern Minimalist generative syntax in full formal detail, and shows how this formal system handles a very large range of different syntactic phenomena? Such that it would be possible to produce a large hand-parsed corpus? It seems like this is what would be needed for generative syntax to have relevance outside linguistics departments. If it exists and I'm just unaware of it, I'd be glad to hear about it!
I'm not sure why you're asking this about Minimalism specifically. There are already wide coverage parsers based on various generative frameworks (e.g. HPSG, LFG, CCG).
It's also a bit odd to suggest that any framework for which there isn't a wide coverage parser lacks any relevance outside linguistics departments. I know of lots of examples of cross-disciplinary work involving generative linguistics, but most of it doesn't relate to parsing at all. I'd say that wide coverage parsers are actually a pretty niche interest, which is one reason why people don't tend to work on them much.
>However, he is IMHO pretty wrong in thinking that this latent structure can't be learned (e.g. inferring a probabilistic context-free grammar).
Please correct me if I'm wrong but your representation of Chomsky's thesis seems to be the opposite of what it is.
Chomsky says that the ability to learn a language is innate - you don't need to go to school to do it, nor do you need to learn grammar rules.
You say that Chomsky says that the "latent structure in language" cant be learned and if my representation is correct, then yours is way off and seems partisan.
> Chomsky is brilliant, no doubt, and critically showed the world how much latent structure there is in language. However, he is IMHO pretty wrong in thinking that this latent structure can't be learned (e.g. inferring a probabilistic context-free grammar).
Presumably you have a critique of his poverty of stimulus argument and not merely a blanket dismissal?
The simple critique of the poverty of the stimulus argument is that there's no poverty of the stimulus: children receive ample, rich linguistic input as well as useful feedback. Children receive a lot more negative evidence than Chomsky suggests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus#Agains... Is Chomsky's argument for the poverty of the stimulus based on empirical observations of child language acquisition?
Chomskyian/generative linguistics completely dominated a generation of young linguists in the 1970s and 1980s: it provided a research program for writing dissertations. But the results were often dubious; generative grammar has great things to say about syntax, but little about morphology, phonology, semantics, &c. Moreover, Chomsky has radically changed his theories several times: his earliest theories, that were most influential, have been all but completely abandoned. Then he went to principles-and-parameters (which is where he lost me, with the argument that pro-drop is conditioned by binary brain switches), and then to the Minimalist Program, which I haven't really bothered to read as much about. But this is a minority paradigm these days. Chomsky's ideas start to really fall apart when you look too closely at some of his premises, like the poverty of the stimulus.
Then there are more traditional linguists (who do more fieldwork and comparative linguistics), applied linguists, and cognitive linguists. All of these groups tend to have separate conferences and have all the problems of scientists in different paradigms, always talking past each other.
EDIT: Chomsky made real, lasting contributions in formalizing the field. He completely transformed the discipline of linguistics for good and bad—but I think his good contributions will endure for a long time, once we get over the Chomskyan hangover.
Generative linguistics is largely discredited these days. It has been out of fashion for a little while, but the last few years have seen studies that more concretely disprove it.
As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
I think this is the prevailing view within linguistics departments (with a few exceptions). Statistical NLP, machine learning, computational anthropology, developmental psychology, etc. are all increasingly reliant on the non-generative work coming out of psycholinguistics and child language acquisition (Levy, Jaeger, Gibson, Wasow, Tomasello, Lieven, Bannard if you want some names).
I don't think there's much of a shift there. You're talking about fields which never had much of a connection with generative linguistics, and where there's no logical reason to think that results in generative linguistics should be particularly relevant or helpful. (Who ever thought that Barriers would have anything to tell us about computational anthropology?)
Generative linguistics is in fact increasingly relevant to NLP, since people are moving towards more complex language models. That's not to say that cutting edge research in syntax is going to be helpful to people trying to solve practical NLP problems, but by the same token, string theory isn't much use if you're trying to build a bridge. It tends to be the basic and well-established results within a field that have useful applications outside it.
I feel like people who make claims like the above are a bit divorced from reality. What would have usurped it as the reigning theory of syntax? OT Syntax? Maybe some sort of extension of DM (itself a spawn of generative ideas)...? Functionalist approaches are still a thing, but I don't think they're any more in vogue than they were 20 years ago.
NLP/Comp Ling is another story entirely, of course, as are semantics, pragmatics, experimental ling, phono pursuits, etc. But for hard syntactic theory I don't think the generative ling is going anywhere.
I mentioned in another comment that linguistics is a multi-paradigmatic field, with different paradigms having different conferences and professional networks. this is the consequence: generative linguists are increasingly out of step with the field as a whole, and yet satisfied with the level of research, publications, &c.
Couldn't you say the same thing about any of the other paradigms? Everyone likes to think that they'e forging ahead on the one true path and leaving the others behind.
No, this has nothing to do with his political views.
Chomsky's work is still seen as something of a foundation of modern linguistics and it's still taught in basic classes at university. It's also been very seminal in that it's brought about a vast array of models and theories that build upon it, including modern models such as the various phrase structure grammars (HPSG for instance).
However, the world of linguistics has changed quite a bit since the 1960s and through areas such as NLP and statistical models in particular we have a far better understanding of the building blocks of human language. Chomsky appears to be somewhat desperately trying to keep up with these changes and accommodate them in his models, which in turn have grown vastly more complex over the years compared with his original simple and elegant x' theory. In recent years, he also comes across as quite stubborn regarding his rejection of statistic models and machine learning.
>Chomsky appears to be somewhat desperately trying to keep up with these changes
Not sure where you're getting that from. Which aspects of Chomsky's recent work do you think are drive by some kind of desire to keep up with developments in NLP?
>his models, which in turn have grown vastly more complex over the years compared with his original simple and elegant x' theory
X' theory was not really 'original'. It was first introduced in Remarks on Nominalization in 1970. The models have not in fact grown vastly more complex. In a number of respects quite significant simplifications have been achieved (e.g. the reduction of large numbers of construction-specific transformational rules to a small number of generalizations about A and A' movement).
My training is in language variation, and I specialized in sociophonetics, so I'm not an expert on syntax, but my understanding is that whenever chomsky's theories are empirically tested on real language data, they don't seem to hold water and he has to go back to the drawing board.
If you are a hacker who is interested in linguistics, you might want to check out the work we are doing at my startup Ozora Research (http://ozoraresearch.com).
Our goal is to build high-quality, sophisticated NLP solutions for "cleantext" : text that has been professionally written and copy-edited, so that it doesn't have obvious errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.
What makes our work different is that, unlike almost all other research in NLP, we don't depend on human-annotated data (like the Penn TreeBank) for training and evaluation. Instead, we build our models into lossless data compressors, and evaluate by invoking the compressor on a large text corpus.
In addition to this change in evaluation methodology, we are also deeply interested in the empirical study of text - that is, in the questions of traditional syntax research. For example, an important part of English syntax relates to verb argument structure: verbs differ in the types of arguments they can accept. Some verbs can accept infinitive complements, that-complements, or indirect objects; others cannot. Our system contains a module that handles argument structure and forwards this information to the parser and compressor.
I wrote a book presenting a rationale for why scientists should be deeply interested in large-scale, lossless data compression. Roughly, empirical data compression research is a variation of the scientific method: if theory A achieves better compression than theory B, then A is closer to the truth. Scientists can use this principle to search systematically through theory-space and find high-quality theories.
Interestingly, compression has a direct link to generation. By sending random bits into the decompressor, you obtain sample sentences that illustrate the model's "idea" of what English text looks like. By studying the discrepancy between the sample sentences and real text, you can discover ways to improve the model. This is a very productive technique that we use routinely. Chomsky declared that his goal was to build a machine that generates grammatical English sentences, but none of his followers actually tried to build such a device. So in some sense our research is actually closer to Chomsky's stated goal than what Chomsky's followers are doing.
I would love to hear from people who might want to collaborate on linguistics work, or use the data compression idea to explore other fields (eg. computer vision, bioinformatics, astronomy).
> KINGDOM OF SPEECH is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech — not evolution — is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements.
It's time to read the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel once more. That's always been a fascinating story for me ... the notion that people were forming a real or virtual tower that threatened divine order and so needed to be split by making their speech mutually unintelligible.
