Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!Portia!kortge From: kortge@Portia.Stanford.EDU (Chris Kortge) Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets Subject: Re: S. Pinker / A. Prince Message-ID: <1078@Portia.Stanford.EDU> Date: 23 Mar 89 04:29:28 GMT References: <2726@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> Sender: Chris Kortge Reply-To: kortge@psych.stanford.edu (Chris Kortge) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 30 In article <2726@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> spam@clutx.clarkson.edu writes: >I just read a rather scathing article by Steven Pinker (MIT) and >Alan Prince (Brandeis) that tore PDP apart. Has anyone seen any >responses to this article that defend Rumelhart and McClelland? >The article bummed me out, and I'm not up enough on language >processing to really debate what they claim. > The article doesn't tear PDP apart at all (I assume you mean the one in _Cognition_, published also as a book, "Connections and Symbols"). What it does do is tear apart one very simple model of a complex phenomenon (learning of past tenses). As far as I could tell, virtually all its criticisms could be answered with a multilayer network model; that is, the faults of the R&M model derive mostly from the fact that it's just a single layer associative network, with hand-wired representations. As I understand it (having heard Dave Rumelhart's response), the R&M model was never intended to be anything near a complete model of tense acquisition--rather, it was mainly supposed to demonstrate that "rule-like" behavior can coexist with "special case" behavior in the same set of connecting weights. If you want to read an article which _attempts_ to tear PDP _in general_ apart, read the one by Fodor and Pylyshyn in the same book. It didn't make much sense to me, but then I guess I don't have the MIT perspective. If someone really wants to blast PDP, there are _real_ problems with it, like scaling of learning time, which make more sense to focus on than the things F&P talk about. Chris Kortge kortge@psych.stanford.edu