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Comment by dbecker | Hacker News Reader

To possibly clarify, the way sentences are structured is itself learned, rather than relying on hard-coded rules.

Maybe you still find deep-learning disappointing, but there have been some successes from having the computer learn multiple levels of internal structure/representation from data.

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The problem is that many sentences (at least in English) exhibit some structural ambiguity (more than one valid syntax tree). Also you have to take into account pragmatics and sociolinguistic factors (like variation), and so on. You can't just feed a formal grammar to a program and expect it to correctly parse English. We're still a LONG way from being able to correctly parse all (or even 99%) of possible English sentences.

It does not depend on hard-coded rules. It learns various probabilities for sentence structures. The result is much more flexible than a formal grammar.

True, but that still means you require some decent priors about the text that someone reading it might have. People generally have an idea of what the person who wrote it might be like, what sort of things to disregard, and so on. My point was that learning the "structure" of the language is not enough. I don't know exactly how this program works though, so it might be decent at that, I haven't read up on it enough.

The program doesn't need to know priors, if you make sure the priors for the test set are close to the same as the ones for the training set :)

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