Edward Gibson: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s your definition of a theory? Because it’s a gigantic black box with a very large number of parameters controlling it. To me, theory usually requires a simplicity, right? Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just being loose there. I think it’s not a great theory, but it’s a theory. It’s a good theory in one sense in that it covers all the data. Anything you want to say in English, it does. And so that’s how it’s arguably the best, is that no other theory is as good as a large language model in predicting exactly what’s good and what’s bad in English. Now, you’re saying is it a good theory? Well, probably not because I want a smaller theory than that. It’s too big, I agree. You could probably construct mechanism by which it can generate a simple explanation of a particular language, like a set of rules. Something like it could generate a dependency grammar for a language, right?…

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