Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!spam
From: spam@sun.soe!clutx.clarkson.edu (Roger Gonzalez,,,)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: S. Pinker / A. Prince
Message-ID: <2736@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Date: 23 Mar 89 21:46:49 GMT
References: <1078@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
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> 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. 

Yeah, so I noticed after I waded through the last 50 pages.

My impressions changed after I was done reading the article.  Seems
to me that they were getting all picky about details that I don't
think R&M intended to be the god's truth about language processing...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't R&M just saying "Look, here's
a simple little model that does a pretty good job with past tenses...
and look, it even seems to exhibit some of the behavior of children
learning language.."

Some of P&P's accusations seemed pretty trivial anyway:
"It can learn rules found in no human language"

SOoooo?

(Or are they assuming the ol' language aquisition device?)


Anyway, I'm reading the "nastier" article you suggested right now.


- Roger


++ Roger Gonzalez ++ spam@clutx.clarkson.edu ++ Clarkson University ++

   "Just like I've always said; there's nothing an agnostic can't do
    if he's not sure he believes in anything or not!" - Monty Python