[lbo-talk] Church Chomsky

[// ravi]

On Mar 22, 2011, at 12:34 PM, Seth Kulick wrote quoting someone whose name he wishes to retain for his own private pleasure:
>> "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…

And then added his thought:
> 
> Generative Grammar is not a foundational work for NLP (natural language
> processing). <…>
> 

Perhaps so, but the mathematician Doron Zeilberger agrees with the first part of your mystery poster’s statement, and considers Chomsky one of the fathers of computer science because of the opposite of what you write above: his natural language work laid the ground for the development of artificial (computer) languages.


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

Interestingly enough, none of my Computation Theory classes (e.g: Ann Yasuhara at Rutgers) included any significant material on Chomsky hierarchies, but both AI/Expert Systems classes did. That’s not to contest your last point, but just to supply an interesting anecdotal bit.

	—ravi