Chomsky by John Rahat

Review & PResentation

Noam Chomsky As seen by

Georgiana Tache Abu Chowdhury University of Louisiana at Lafayette CSC 619 Spring 2015

Presented for

Dr. Subrata Dasgupta

outline CHOMSKY

outline Background ~ Introduction ~ Early Life, Family, & Education Overview â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Achievement & Contribution A look into ~ Connection with Computer Science ~ Chomsky Hierarchy ~ AI & NLP The Other Life & Reference

Introduction Noam Chomsky is an eminent American theoretical linguist, who radically changed the field of linguistics by stating that language is a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. His ideas have significant logical implications for various subjects of Psychology, and also extends to Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Neurology, Mathematics and of course Computer Science He suggested that innate traits in the human brain give birth to both language and grammar. He created Chomsky Hierarchy which lead programmers to accomplish meaningful linguistic goals systematically

Logician

Social Justice Activist

Cognitive Scientist

Political Commenter Anarcho-syndicalist Advocate

Early Life, Family & Education Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 to a middleclass Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia. His parents, William & Elsie Chomsky were both scholars and taught in Mikveh Israel. They both were big influence in his life. Noam was the Chomsky family's first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later. The brothers were raised in a Jewish environment and taught in Hebrew by their parents.

Early Life, Family & Education Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was a "taboo" in his family to speak it. Unlike his father, his mother Elsie spoke "ordinary New York English". Even in 1945 Chomsky embarked on a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where his primary interest was in learning Arabic. In one interview, Prof. Chomsky mentions having taught courses in 'Scientific French' and 'Scientific German' at MIT in the 1950s. It is still a myth how many languages he actually knew, but despite this, his works massively influenced the world of languages.

Early Life, Family & Education Chomsky's primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School. It was here that he wrote his first article, aged 10, on the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona Aged 12, he moved on to secondary education at Central High School where he was troubled by the hierarchical and regimented method of teaching that they employed From age 13, he started traveling to New York and there his political interests would get shaped. His uncle, living there and owning a newspaper stand, would often join other Jewish leftists to debate the issues of the day.

Early Life, Family & Education He entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he was attracted to the field of linguistics. Although dissatisfied with the strict structure of the university, he was encouraged to continue by the Russian born linguist Zellig Harris, who convinced Chomsky to major in the subject. He received his B.A. (1949) and M.A. (1951), . MA thesis title is “The morphophonemics of modern Hebrew”. In 1955 joins MIT as a professor in dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy continues PhD at U. Pennsylvania as well as Harvard, his dissertation was expressed later in the book “Syntactic Structures” (p. 1957)

Early Life, Family & Education Chomsky was a family oriented person from early age whether it was with his parents or with his own family. He entered a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since they were very young. They were married in 1949 and remained together until her death in 2008. There is no doubt that his family and education had influenced him, but he also clearly struck by the obvious contradictions between his own readings and mainstream press reports and that shaped him what he has become - A symbol of knowledge and intellect. Biographer Robert F. Barsky

Contributions and Achievements His first work on linguistics, Syntactic structures, is a book that radically opposed the dominant Harris Bloomfield trend in the field. Linguist John Lyons later asserted that it "revolutionized the scientific study of languageâ&#x20AC;?. In 1959 he attracted further attention for his review of B.F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the journal Language, in which he argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why children are able to learn different languages more easily than adultsâ&#x20AC;?

Contributions and Achievements The concept of Generative grammar is a research paradigm initiated by Chomsky, today regarded as a linguistic theory which considers grammar as a system of rules generating exactly the combinations of words which form grammatical sentences in a given language. After 1950, many approaches of the generative grammar occurred and also, the Chomsky hierarchy brought new ways of comparing and describing them. Along with the Generative grammar, Chomsky also forwarded an argument that the behaviorist explanations of human behavior are inadequate, thus fueling the â&#x20AC;&#x153;cognitive revolutionâ&#x20AC;? that took place in the 1960s and gave birth to cognitive science.

Contributions and Achievements The simplest grammars capable of generating an infinite set of sentences with a finite vocabulary and a finite set of possibly recursive rules are called by Chomsky finite state grammars. The modeling of such grammars is borrowed from the automata theory which had just emerged in computer science The second model Chomsky proposed is called phrase structure grammar, with a more satisfactory application. The third model Chomsky created is called the transformational grammar, with considerably extended rules generating much more possible output as before. This system of transformational grammar brought a touch of mathematical description for the language. The mathematical rigor and precision of formulating properties was the best contribution he had to linguistics.

Connection with Computer Science Around 1950s, a new idea emerged in the realm of computing:

How to compose computer programs without having to deal with more complicated aspects pertaining to the machine architecture. This problem was split into two: First - to design a mathematical language for expressing an algorithm, and Second - to translate these programs into machine code. The first problem was resolved with the emergence of a new discipline, called design of computer programs, and the second - by the emergence

of compiler design. FORTRAN

COBOL

ALGOL

Meta language - BNF

Connection with Computer Science

In parallel to the BNF metalanguage, it was Chomsky's new theories that gained attention. He clarified for the first time what a language should mean - a (possibly infinite) set of sentences, each sentence being composed of a finite set of elementsÂ? The set of elements was referred to as the alphabet, but not every possible sentence is valid unless it obeys a set of grammar rules. A grammar with rules involving terminal and non-terminal symbols was called context-free grammar, which belongs to Chomsky's TYPE2 hierarchy model.

Although this type of language proved inadequate for describing natural languages in linguistics, in the field of computer science it became very important and remained useful until today, especially in the sphere of compilers.

The Chomsky Hierarchy Also known as Chomsky Schutzenberger hierarchy, it appeared in 1956. The following table summarizes each of Chomsky's four types of grammars, the class of language it generates, the type of automaton that recognizes it, and the form its rules must have Class

Grammar

Languages

Type - 0

Unrestricted

Type – 1

Contextsensitive Context-free

Recursively enumerable (Turingrecognizable) Contextsensitive Context-free

Regular

Type – 2 Type – 3

Automatio n Turing machine Linearbounded Pushdown Finite

AI & NLP Another field that Noam Chomsky influenced is the Natural Language Processing from AI. The field of NLP originated in 1940, and at the time Chomsky published his first major book, he raised some problems regarding the validity of certain sentences, which are grammatically incorrect. He claimed that they are expected to be classified as nonsense by the machine models as well. The field of NLP split into two until 1970s: symbolic and stochastic research respectively. The symbolic or rule based branch corresponded to research in formal languages and syntax generation, and was composed of linguists and computer scientists working together to create what they considered to be the beginning of Artificial Intelligence. The stochastic branch, in change, focused on problems of character recognition and pattern matching.

AI & NLP A recent argument took place between Noam Chomsky and Peter Norvig, researcher, professor and author of the most popular AI book in the world. Chomsky pronounced himself in favor of a theory of intelligence and language which would simplify the structures underneath as much as possible, whereas Norvig emphasized the statistical way, even though it might not satisfy or be good for every single piece of data.

The current AI approach to language translation and understanding is massively relying on statistics, with the usage of big data, sometimes making grammar rules useless. The Google approach itself is not to really understand language, but to gather more and more data and then to deliver the most probable answer to a query. Norvig believes that human language is too complex to be described in a simple model that Chomsky insists upon.

The Other Life POLITICS

Chomsky’s intellectual life has been divided between his work in linguistic and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third None the less, his international lectures and debates always get national interest. He has taken firm stands on multiple issues, such as freedom of speech, terrorism, US foreign affairs and wars in different parts of the world, US government, capitalism and corporatism, Middle East, etc. THE NEW GENERATION

We could say that Chomsky, despite his age, is still a modern man, always in touch with the current world affairs and the youth. In 2012, he performed a role in the "MIT Gangnam Style", a parody of the "Gangnam Style" music video. Moreover, he is the main character in a critically acclaimed film named “Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?”, which was produced in 2013. He has a number of other documentaries and his online popularity is quite high.

The Other Life

AND HE REPLIES

REFERENCE References [1] “Noam Chomsky – A Life of Dissent”, Robert F. Barsky, The MIT Press, 1998 [2] “The Chomsky Notebook”, multiple authors, edited by Jean Bricmont and Julie Franck, 2010 [3] “It began with Babbage – The genesis of Computer Science” Subrata Dasgupta, chapter 13 [4] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/200405/ nlp/overview_history.html [5] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvigvschomskyandthefightforthefutureofai [6] “Penguin modern masters – Noam Chomsky”, John Lyons, 1977 [7] “The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective”, George A. Miller, Princeton 2003

Thank You

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. ~ Noam Chomsky