Chomsky's one paragraph quote at the beginning of this article is more clear and thoughtful than the rest of this. I feel the author's missing the point.
In the case of language, observing and reporting statistical probabilities in written/spoken language output does very little to explain the cognitive systems used in acquiring and using language. Even one statistical anomaly serves to show that statistical learning is NOT the entire picture when it comes to language development.
There was another article on HN a while back that had another great quote from Chomsky that does well to illustrate what I feel is his main point here: "Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim; nor does it fail to establish the fact". Creating a computer that can produce millions of grammatical utterances does little to show that we understand language systems. Now, if a computer could - like humans - learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances, that's a different story. But that story will take a lot more than statistical learning to write.
In the case of language, observing and reporting statistical probabilities in written/spoken language output does very little to explain the cognitive systems used in acquiring and using language. Even one statistical anomaly serves to show that statistical learning is NOT the entire picture when it comes to language development.
There was another article on HN a while back that had another great quote from Chomsky that does well to illustrate what I feel is his main point here: "Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim; nor does it fail to establish the fact". Creating a computer that can produce millions of grammatical utterances does little to show that we understand language systems. Now, if a computer could - like humans - learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances, that's a different story. But that story will take a lot more than statistical learning to write.