Still curious their response.
I find it interesting that an offhand and correct comment calling Chomsky a giant of the field (as he absolutely is) led to a torrent of correction, as if I endorsed all of his ideas. That, I find, to be really remarkable. Can you explain it to me?
The irony here is that I am actually, in my professional work, sharply critical of Chomsky’s approach to language. His approach underlied what I see as the largely failed effort of AI in the 60s, 70’s and 80’s, which might be finally coming to an end with IBM Watson. In its place, the statistical approaches like (HMM, deep learning, LSI, latent semantic indexing) are actually where my professional expertise is in, and where we have been able to apply these approaches both to text, and also to biology.
And on a philosophical level, I am much more drawn to embodied cognition, as it is seem more coherent with the Incarnation, explains why the early AI projects failed, and also creates some of the most believable conceptions of how strong AI could arise (see Westworld), if it is at all possible.
None of that, however, detracts from Chomsky being a true giant in the field. Recognizing that does not mean I agree with his conception of everything. For the conversations we have had, however, none of his failings detract from the point. How does recognizing this make me a Chomsky devotee, and uninformed about the field?
Very confused by this comment @Chris_Falter. Alexa is using a probabilistic model. How can probabilistic models be behind Alexa when Alexa is dependent on probabilistic models?