Slashdot Mirror
New Algorithm for Learning Languages
An anonymous reader writes "U.S. and Israeli researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences."
Perhaps a linguist could weigh in on this, but it seems to me that this kind of research is quite contrary to the Chomskian view of linguistics.
Instead of a language module with specialized abilities tuned to learn rule-based grammar, we have an an unsupervised learning system has surmised the grammar of the language merely from the patterns inherent in the data it is given. That a system can do this is evidence against the notion that an innate grammar module in the brain is necessary for language.