Alejandro, I enjoy your writing even and would love to take a class from you. Though I need to reread this (I have a lot of thoughts swirling right now about how formal language may be a purification of natural language, cleaning it of ambiguities and empty shells), I wanted to let you know that your passion and energy shine through.
Thanks, Terry, those are really kind words. You're right, in a sense formal languages are a way to distill the ambiguous notions in natural languages to something that is mathematically workable, and actually, the father of computational linguistics is no other that Noam Chomsky.
Yes! Chomsky is in my head as a linguist! I knew that vaguely about computational interests but it didn’t compute. I need to poke around a little. Any advice on seminal computational Chomsky texts?
Oh, I briefly read one his early books on computational linguistics when I was in undergrad, but since Chomsky the field has developed so much in the direction of more math and computer science that we really only mention Chomsky passingly in undergrad, but we don't study his work as it's far more towards the linguistics side.
Chomsky was a staple in the linguistics courses I took in my MA program. I didn’t read him after I started the doc program in literacy. I’ll look into his travels in the direction of CS.
In terms of relevant for computational linguistics and formal language theory, I believe the seminal book is Aspects of the Theory of Syntax where he develops his formal grammars which underpin how modern programming languages and basically everything language-related in computer science works.
Yes, the 1965 book Aspects. Chomsky is considered the primo example of a theorist in one discipline creating the foundation of a separate discipline. You would really no need to read him in CS because the discipline was already born when you arrived as an undergrad or ever, really. It’s a fascinating situation
I enjoyed it! Eager to read further chapters… also I had no idea there was such a CS topic. I’ve briefly heard of it somewhere but didn’t know it was so important, so thanks for that!
Thanks! It's one of the coolest areas in theoretical CS and it has surprising connections with complexity and algorithm analysis. I think you'll love the upcoming articles.
Thanks ;) This is one topic I wanted to get into for a long time, but never had a good justification until now. It's one of the coolest dark corners in CS theory.
Alejandro, I enjoy your writing even and would love to take a class from you. Though I need to reread this (I have a lot of thoughts swirling right now about how formal language may be a purification of natural language, cleaning it of ambiguities and empty shells), I wanted to let you know that your passion and energy shine through.
Thanks, Terry, those are really kind words. You're right, in a sense formal languages are a way to distill the ambiguous notions in natural languages to something that is mathematically workable, and actually, the father of computational linguistics is no other that Noam Chomsky.
Yes! Chomsky is in my head as a linguist! I knew that vaguely about computational interests but it didn’t compute. I need to poke around a little. Any advice on seminal computational Chomsky texts?
Oh, I briefly read one his early books on computational linguistics when I was in undergrad, but since Chomsky the field has developed so much in the direction of more math and computer science that we really only mention Chomsky passingly in undergrad, but we don't study his work as it's far more towards the linguistics side.
Chomsky was a staple in the linguistics courses I took in my MA program. I didn’t read him after I started the doc program in literacy. I’ll look into his travels in the direction of CS.
In terms of relevant for computational linguistics and formal language theory, I believe the seminal book is Aspects of the Theory of Syntax where he develops his formal grammars which underpin how modern programming languages and basically everything language-related in computer science works.
Yes, the 1965 book Aspects. Chomsky is considered the primo example of a theorist in one discipline creating the foundation of a separate discipline. You would really no need to read him in CS because the discipline was already born when you arrived as an undergrad or ever, really. It’s a fascinating situation
He did. I wonder if he even imagines how fundamental his insights were
This is wonderful. Thanks Alejandro.
Thanks to you! ❤️
I enjoyed it! Eager to read further chapters… also I had no idea there was such a CS topic. I’ve briefly heard of it somewhere but didn’t know it was so important, so thanks for that!
Thanks! It's one of the coolest areas in theoretical CS and it has surprising connections with complexity and algorithm analysis. I think you'll love the upcoming articles.
Thanks for this, Alejandro! It’s a great lesson for non-CS people too. Can’t wait for future installments!
Thanks ;) This is one topic I wanted to get into for a long time, but never had a good justification until now. It's one of the coolest dark corners in CS theory.