<p>Any 5 year-old child can produce utterances that are grammatical, yet unique. Noam Chomsky raised serious doubts that imitation can account for this universal human behavior. The alternate explanation he and his students pursued did become sort of a treadmill. So their approach has been pretty much shelved by researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing. They’ve embraced statistical techniques but those seem to have their own limitations. They have not yet resulted in machines fully imitating grammatical-yet-creative natural language behaviors. “What are the algorithms?” indeed.</p>
<p>So whatever you think of Noam Chomsky or B.F. Skinner, and regardless of the approach you follow, you’ll find a lifetime of interesting problems to solve in any field related to the mind and language. I do agree with siserune that one should try to find a rigorous program and avoid fluff. K is making a good effort to do that consistent with her own interests and personality.</p>