GoKawiilPeter Norvig rebuts Chomsky's critique of statistical language models
Linguist Noam Chomsky had argued that statistical machine learning approaches to language merely approximate data without producing scientific understanding, calling this a novel and flawed notion of success. In response, Peter Norvig wrote an essay examining Chomsky's claims point by point, questioning whether engineering success in language modeling is truly irrelevant to science and whether Chomsky's characterization of statistical models is accurate.