[lbo-talk] Church Chomsky

[// ravi]

On Mar 22, 2011, at 1:34 PM, Seth Kulick wrote:
> Ravi wrote:
> 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.
> 

Ah, I hear you now! And I am suitably mortified by my attribution snark. :-)


> 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.

Indeed it doesn’t. The confusion between us might be in how we are reading Monsieur Robert’s quoted text above. I read it to mean (a) “Chomsky’s work was … foundational for computer science” and (b) Chomsky’s work was foundational for “natural language processing”. In my mind, (b) is what you seem to take umbrage to, quite likely with justification. My point was that (a) is not far off the mark, as per (among other people) Rutgers programmatic theorem solving and other adventures mathematician Doron Zeilberger.

I couldn’t agree more with you that natural language processing and the field of programming languages are different fields. Perhaps that wasn’t clear when I wrote “opposite of what you wrote”, above.

	—ravi