Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language

Re:Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language by dllthomas on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @01:38AM (#36321850)

As I understand it, the question was whether humans learn language starting from a "blank slate" or whether there's some meaningful structure built in (that's therefore common across all human languages). Chomsky's argument was that children are not exposed to enough example sentences to learn all the rules they learn. It's an argument from the information content of the corpus made available to the language learner, irrespective of the capabilities of the learner.

Therefore, if we're able to do the same thing by simply applying more resources, that would undermine his argument in a way that doing the same thing with a vastly larger corpus (whatever the resources we throw at it) doesn't.

I should note that this is based on recollections from 20+ years ago and no serious engagement with the article at hand, so, uh, appropriate salt.

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Re:Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language by EGreg on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @05:09AM (#36323347)

That makes no sense. A “vastly larger corpus” would not have the property of “not being exposed to enough example sentences”. If anything, the amount of sentences is far far more than any human would ever encounter — let alone a child.

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Re:Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language by dllthomas on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @12:25PM (#36328311)

Right, that's the point - success with a huge corpus doesn't tell us it would have been possible with a realistic corpus, so doesn't refute the argument.

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