Syntactic structures
by Noam Chomsky · first published 1900
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16HN commenters
2010–2026first – last mentioned
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American linguist Paul Postal wrote in 1964 that most of the "syntactic conceptions prevalent in the United States" were "versions of the theory of phrase structure grammars in the sense of Chomsky". British linguist John Lyons wrote in 1966 that "no work has had a greater influence upon the current linguistic theory than Chomsky's Syntactic Structures." Prominent historian of linguistics R. H. Robins wrote in 1967 that the publication of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" was "probably the most radical and important change in direction in descriptive linguistics and in linguistic theory that ha
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…http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html and automata theory (Hopcroft) Practical Text Mining with Perl (Bilisoly) Natural Language Processing with Python (Bird) Computational Linguistics (Hausser) Syntactic structures (Chomsky) also check out these links: http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/learning-about... http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-m... http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gabr/resources/resources.html
on “Ask HN: Best Text Mining Resources” ↗…productive one. I haven’t read this researchers full paper, but I would be sad (tho not shocked…) if it didn’t cite Chomsky up front. Beyond your specific point re:interfaces—which I recommend the OG Syntactic Structures for more commentary on—he’s been saying what she’s saying here for about half a century. He’s too humble/empirical to ever say it without qualifiers, but IMO the truth is clear when viewed holistically:…
on “Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought” ↗This was actually not Chomsky's first book on this topic. That was Syntactic Structures (1957).
on “The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” ↗It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence,…
on “Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? (1997)” ↗…adjacent to a given word, without paying attention to any structure. Whereas in real human languages--any human language--there is a hierarchical structure. This has been known since 1957 (Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, although I suspect that context free or weakly context sensitive models are sufficient). Is there a way to force a neural net to construct hierarchical models? And of course the hierarchies are not…
on “Deep learning is hitting a wall?” ↗…respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected! -- as Knuth discovered while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961. "Chomsky theories fascinated me, because they were mathematical yet they could also be understood with my programmer's intuition. It was very curious because otherwise, as a…
on “A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf]” ↗> (...) while reading Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures on his honeymoon in 1961 Which makes you wonder, what kind of person reads this stuff on the honeymoon.
on “A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf]” ↗…did". Norvig chooses to point out that the principles and parameters framework is, let's say, imperfect, but, well, Chomsky would agree. Moreover, if you zoom out and stop obsessing about quotes from "Syntactic Structures", you will realize that a lot of the work that's being done in theoretical linguistics is not quite as barren. Yes, statistical methods for (say) anaphora resolution can be extremely efficient, but basically…
on “On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning” ↗…influential one. The article even agrees with you: > §3 sets out a radically revised structure for transformational grammars, quietly abandoning the notion of “kernel sentence” from Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, and introducing the term “deep structure,” which in a sense replaces it.
on “The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” ↗…language processing, which wikipedia confirms started in the 1970's with the work of Richard Montague [2]. Somehow I had convinced myself this work hails from much earlier, around the time of (Chomsky's) Syntactic Structures - but that again is from the late '50s. Anyway, this kind of analysis does make use of the lambda calculus and category theory _today_ but perhaps Montague's early work didn't specifically do so. Like…
on “SHRDLU (1971)” ↗Haha, yes, perhaps. "I found the mathematical approach to grammar immediately appealing---so much so, in fact, that I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961." - Knuth
on “Parsing: a timeline” ↗…case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.
on “Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? (1997)” ↗The Chomsky Hierarchy isn't the right way to think about, in fact the Chomsky paradigm probably held back progress in language technology over the past 70 years. In the Kuhnian sense, Syntactic Structures was the vanguard of a paradigm shift that let linguists do "normal science" in terms of positing a range of problems and writing papers about them. It was also useful in computer science for formally…
on “Where Is GPT in the Chomsky Hierarchy?” ↗You saw name "Noam Chomsky" and that started a process in your mind that generated the standard spiel about Syntactic Structures. Chomsky Hierarchy is his more fundamental work that joins computer science and linguistics. It was published in IRE Transactions on Information Theory. Chomsky, Noam (1956). "Three models for the description…
on “Where Is GPT in the Chomsky Hierarchy?” ↗…kept moving the stack pointer around all the time for no real reason when an assembly program could move data to and from statically allocated structures. [3] FORTRAN and COBOL came out around the time Syntactic Structures did so of course there was not an established theory for how to parse grammars, no parser generators, etc. No Dragon Book, but the heroic techniques used to develop compilers in that age are legendary…
on “Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran” ↗