Here’s an incredibly thoughtful and articulate critique of Noam Chomsky’s position on linguistic modeling from Peter Norvig, directory of research at Google. Just a totally fantastic read.

At the Brains, Minds, and Machines symposium held during MIT’s 150th birthday party, Technology Review reports that Prof. Noam Chomsky MIT: 150derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior.The transcript is now available, so let’s quote Chomsky himself:It’s true there’s been a lot of work on trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems. I think there have been some successes, but a lot of failures. There is a notion of success … which I think is novel in the history of science. It interprets success as approximating unanalyzed data.This essay discusses what Chomsky said, speculates on what he might have meant, and tries to determine the truth and importance of his claims.

Source: On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

Note: a fair amount of Norvig’s position seems to be drawn from Christopher Manning’s 2002 paper “Probabilistic Syntax,” which goes into more depth on some of these topics and is also a good read, although not as much fun as Norvig’s.