Zusammenfassung
At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium held during MIT’s 150th birthday party, Technology Review reports that Prof. Noam Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. This essay discusses what Chomsky said, speculates on what he might have meant, and tries to determine the truth and importance of his claims.
This essay first appeared on Peter Norvig’s blog: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc; previously he directed Google’s core search algorithms group. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abney, Steve. 1996. Statistical Methods and Linguistics. In The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language, ed. Judith L. Klavans and Philip Resnik, 1-26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Breiman, Leo. 2001. Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures. Statistical Science 16(3): 199-231.
Chomsky, Noam. 1956. Three Models for the Description of Language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2(3): 113-124.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1969. Some Empirical Assumptions in Modern Philosophy of Language. In Philosophy, Science and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel, ed. S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, and M. White, 260-285. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Chomsky, Noam. 1991. Linguistics and Adjacent Fields: A Personal View, in The Chomskyan Turn, ed. A. Kasher, 3-25. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Gold, E. M. 1967. Language Identification in the Limit. Information and Control 10(5): 447-474.
Horning, J. J. 1969. A study of grammatical inference. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
Johnson, Kent. 2004. Gold’s Theorem and cognitive science. Philosophy of Science 71: 571-592.
Lappin, Shalom, and Shieber, Stuart M. 2007. Machine learning theory and practice as a source of insight into universal grammar. Journal of Linguistics 43(2): 393-427.
Manning, Christopher. 2002. Probabilistic Syntax. In Probabilistic Linguistics, ed. Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stefanie Jannedy, 289-341. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Norvig, Peter. 2007. How to Write a Spelling Corrector. http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html Shows working code to implement a probabilistic, statistical spelling correction algorithm.
Norvig, Peter. 2009. Natural Language Corpus Data. In Beautiful Data, ed. Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher, 219-242. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
Pereira, Fernando. 2002. Formal grammar and information theory: together again? In The Legacy of Zellig Harris, ed. Bruce E. Nevin and Stephen B. Johnson, 13-32. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Plato. c. 380BC. The Republic.
Shannon, C.E. 1948. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379-423.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Norvig, P. (2017). On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning. In: Pietsch, W., Wernecke, J., Ott, M. (eds) Berechenbarkeit der Welt?. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12153-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-12153-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-12152-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-12153-2
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)