> Now I do believe that purely statistical methods will hit a wall - the same way you could never teach a baby to communicate by throwing it a copy of Wikipedia and nothing else.
Nick Chater and Paul Vitányi wrote papers[0] demonstrating that "the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input":
- ‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence,
- The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis,
- Language Learning From Positive Evidence, Reconsidered: A Simplicity-Based Approach.
Nick Chater and Paul Vitányi wrote papers[0] demonstrating that "the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input":
- ‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence,
- The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis,
- Language Learning From Positive Evidence, Reconsidered: A Simplicity-Based Approach.
[0] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/learning.html