[lbo-talk] Church Chomsky

[Seth Kulick]

"regarding MIT, his Generative Grammer work was one of the
foundational works for computer science and especially the natural
language processing that Google and the NSA now run the world with...
he is quite candid in stating for many years his own department was
funded exclusively by the Pentagon"

Generative Grammar is not a foundational work for NLP (natural language
processing).  Some recent work in machine translation is using more
information about syntax
but even that has a rather tenuous connection to Chomsky's work. There
are some strands of work in NLP that have some connection but the above
is a huge exaggeration.

The Chomsky hierarchy however is still taught in undergraduate computer
science courses on Theory of Computation, and probably always will be.

Seth