On the Discovery Procedure
On the Discovery Procedure
On what linguistic theory is about, Chomsky (1957) discussed three views: the discovery procedure, the decision procedure, and the evaluation procedure. Chomsky rejected the discovery view for being “unreasonable” and argued for the evaluation view for being “practical”. Among the researchers who take the discussion seriously is John Goldsmith, with long-standing work on unsupervised learning of linguistic structure. While Goldsmith himself strongly sees his work as a response and realization of the evaluation procedure, this chapter makes the stronger claim that his research program is the higher-order goal of the discovery procedure. This chapter ends with methodological remarks on the importance of shaping linguistic research as an enterprise towards the discovery procedure.
Keywords: discovery procedure, evaluation metric, algorithms, unsupervised learning
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