> > His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental.
> I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory
Chomsky did great work for CS (and NLP) through formal language theory, but his work in linguistics -- in particular, his anti-empiricism and hostility to statistical views of language -- was very unhelpful for getting computers to understand language. See e.g. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf
Chomsky did great work for CS (and NLP) through formal language theory, but his work in linguistics -- in particular, his anti-empiricism and hostility to statistical views of language -- was very unhelpful for getting computers to understand language. See e.g. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf