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 mystery poster was, let's see, Nicholas Roberts. Forgive me. I get lbo as a digest and then post separately, on the rare occasions that I do, from gmail, so it's not just a simple reply.
Anyway, there is no contradiction. I was responding to the reference to "natural* language processing, and not *artificial* (computer) languages. It is not just a difference in name. They are very different fields. And no, Generative Grammar is not foundational work for NLP. It doesn't take away from his other achievements to say so.