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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."
From Star Trek???
This won't disprove Chomsky's theories, at most it will serve as evidence that language can be learned through statistical means. The reason it won't disprove anything is because we're ultimately interested in the way that *humans* learn language. Whether or not it's possible to learn a language solely through statistical means doesn't change the fact of the matter for humans, which may or may not have a genetic endowment for learning language. It's entirely possible that it's possible in principle to learn language this way, but we do it with some priors (the universal grammar).
There have been basically two prongs of the arguments in favor of the Universal Grammar debate. The first is that the task of learning an infinite grammar from a finite subset of sentences (and then only from positive evidence) appears to be too difficult to accomplish solely through statistical means. The second is an effort to show that language learning is biologically- rather than experience-based. This is the effort to show that there is a critical period in language development, which would suggest that there is a strong biological (i.e., genetic) component to langauge learning.
In my opinion, the first prong isn't very strong, since it relies on assumptions about statistical learning to make its claims. Their claims to me seem to stem more from a lack of imagination than from anything we can pin down as logically necessary. Shimon Edelman's work would work against this prong, showing that yes, it is possible to learn a language via statistcal means. (It would still have to be shown that the knowledge the computer possesses is qualitatively similar to that learned by humans... it may learn languages in a completely different way).
His findings wouldn't affect the second prong at all, though, which to my mind is the stronger of the two approaches. There have been lots of studies which suggest that there is a biological timecourse for language acquisition, suggesting that we do have an innate capacity for it.
So to sum up, while I find it a very exciting and important finding, I don't believe it will disprove the theory of Universal Grammar.