AK Dewdney's _New Turing Omnibus_ has a short chapter on it. (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~akd/PERSONAL/books_and_articles.html) I don't remember it well, but it's maybe the best intro to CS topics I know.
Also there's Grune/Jacob's book on parsing, available online (http://www.few.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html); and Sipser's lean intro to computation. I recommend just skimming through the first couple chapters of either book, quickly skipping any parts which get bogged down in details or bore you.
At the end of Grune's ch2, there's a nice silhouette of a rose which illustrates the approximations...
But I dunno why anyone would care about this in a vacuum, unless they have a reason to... For example, most programmers in the world don't know this stuff, nor do they generally feel the need to.
> The one thing that drove me nuts about Chomsky was the generative grammar stuff. I did not trust either the impulse behind it or its "discoveries".
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by that?
All the best, Tj
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 5:52 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> The one thing that drove me nuts about Chomsky was the generative grammar stuff.
>
> 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
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