I did not trust either the impulse behind it or its "discoveries". If it did provide the foundation to anything I'd be curious to know. But otherwise....
If you could point me to the hierarchy/theory of computation stuff, I'd be grateful.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Seth Kulick" <skulick at seas.upenn.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 9:34:25 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Church Chomsky
"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 ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk