I see BERT as non sensical. You need to be scientific and have a mathematical theory on how humans learn language, which is a multi disciplinary task requiring physicists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and linguists. Benchmarks are useless, theories, models, experiments and testable predictions is how science progresses. You’re making a comment on cognitive science, and trying to imply that language learning in humans isn’t learned, but pre baked. The psychological, linguistic, evolutionary biology and neuroscience evidence doesn’t seem to corroborate. The evidence points stronger to humans having general learning and problem solving abilities. For instance, there was no evolutionary pressure for humans to be good at math or programming. I was not born knowing english or calculus or probability theory, these were learned abilities. Evolution favoured brain mechanisms that lead to behaviour for success in a rapidly changing world. Had I been born in ancient Rome as a farmer, I would learn to speak Latin, and learn how to be a successful farmer, instead of the physics, math, probability, computer, driving, reading skills that I learned in my life time.
bumby|5 years ago
You make good points, but this one isn’t quite what I meant. I didn’t mean we are trained by evolution for a particular language, but that evolution selected for a language skill. In other words, we are “pre-baked” with the ability to learn a language. It would be analogous to a DL model being trained for generalized regression but not a particular problem. To that extent, I think we’re saying the same thing. Some of the theories related to our generalized learning abilities postulate they stem from this base ability (our aptitude for music, for example, being a consequence of our language learning ability)
>I see BERT as non sensical. You need to be scientific and have a mathematical theory
This is a matter of contention. A lot of science progresses by starting with an empirical result that drives a change in theory rather than the other way around. I can’t remember who to attribute it to, but there’s a quote to the effect that “‘Thats odd’ is the most productive phrase in science, rather than ‘Eureka!’”
acdc4life|5 years ago
Yes it did, and we do know a lot about general principles behind, from different disciplines. This is still an early science. NLP research still hasn’t considered many important aspects of language learning that we have discovered in such a short period of time.
> starting with an empirical result
What makes you think these benchmarks are empirical? They were hand constructed to fit some objective, assuming that being good at the said objective is required for NLP tasks. Where’s the empirical experiments to validate the notion that said objectives lead to language? Science hasn’t worked this way, datasets aren’t constructed, you do an experiment and MEASURE it. Then you make models, try to explain the phenomenon, and test new ideas and validate your models. Can your model extrapolate new information and suggest new experiments to validate? I used the word extrapolate over predict intentionally.