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Posted by andsoitis 1 day ago

Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning (2011)(www.norvig.com)
142 points | 131 commentspage 2
muh_gradle 1 day ago|
This is an old, old post by Norvig fyi.
lo_zamoyski 1 day ago||
It's more or less the classic clash of two modernist attitudes, that of the rationalist (Chomsky) and the empiricist (Norvig). The intellectual wound this division introduces is longstanding. However, I would say Norvig has the overall advantage.

1. Norvig is correct that observation and fact/data collection are necessary for science. However, Chomsky is correct that the ultimate goal of science is to determine the principles governing something. Ergo: you need the first to do the second. The intellect abstracts from source data, but nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.

2. Chomsky here is uninterested in things like speech - he only cares about the underlying syntax. But syntax - expressed and instantiated in matter - is known through speech, and probabilities presuppose an underlying determinate syntax. Ergo: a complete science of speech is end-to-end, from the "reading" or interpretation of noisy data through syntactic processing all the way through to expression.

3. Chomsky focuses heavily on internal generation. Norvig points out that interpretation is a separate, highly practical challenge. Figuring out what someone means in a noisy, ambiguous world is an exercise in prudence which involves weighing contingencies and probabilities to arrive at the most likely truth. Of course, this can only be done against a presupposed acceptance of the function of speech which is to communicate meaning and what is true (hence why lies work and why they are an abuse of speech). Probabilistic reasoning is still reasoning. It's reasoning in the face of incomplete information (against a backdrop of presuppositions) which is a component of prudential reasoning.

jibalt 3 hours ago|
Science has multiple goals. One of the most important and valuable ones is to make accurate predictions.

Note that the base epistemology of science is inference to the best explanation, not "truth".

suddenlybananas 1 day ago||
It's so clear that Norvig knows so little about linguistics as a subject, I mean the suggestion that English is "kinda" a pro-drop language like Spanish is just unserious. There's this kind of lazy criticism of generative work where people hear the vague idea of a theory and critique without even seriously reading anything about it. These are facts that generativists are perfectly aware of and have explanations for.

It's sort of like criticising Galileo's putative experiment about dropping two balls from the leaning tower of Pisa by pointing out that a feather indeed falls slower than a iron ball.

segmondy 17 hours ago||
He never made claim that English is kinda a pro-drop language. His argument that it's easy to make a binary statement that Spanish is a pro-drop language and English is not, but reality is messy. He shows counter example in English, might not be common, nothing is stopping English from evolving like that. No matter the rules, trying to describe natural languages with rules always breaks down, the exception just grows. I think his argument was well presented, we can't brush off probabilistic models because we don't understand it all when they work so well. This essay is 15 years old way before the LLMs of today. It would be interesting to see his additional take on it.
suddenlybananas 13 hours ago||
My point is that is not at all a counter example. It is left-edge deletion which is a distinct phenomenon which has been studied since the 70s. It might look like pro-drop to a naive person but it is fundamentally different. For example, you can delete plenty of things on the left edge that _aren't_ pronouns and you can't delete pronouns if they're not on the left-most edge. These are things that don't occur in pro-drop languages where you can always exclude the pronoun.

do you want a cracker -> you want a cracker?

I think he is dumb -> * I think is dumb

It's a lazy dismissal from someone who doesn't know the relevant facts.

alethic 18 hours ago||
I agree with you that the criticism of government & binding theory is lazy. However, it is not too far off from how people actually criticize it, wrt. giving example after example that G&B simply handles inelegantly (particularly wrt. Principle C). It is not a nice theory, and that is why no one believes in it anymore. Despite it being deep in every linguist's bones...
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