Hi Ada, When my niece was 3 year old, she said to her little brother “Maman, elle venira plus tard…” (Mum will come back later, in “incorrect” French).
She made a “mistake" here by using “venira” (a wrong future form for verb venir (to come)) instead of the “correct" “viendra”. It was wrong, but perfectly predictable using the most productive morphological rules of French future formation. She was 3 years old, so I doubt she was really understanding what morphology is, nevertheless, with this mistake, she clearly showed me that her way of learning languages did not consisted in reading/listening to huge amounts of utterances but she was able to learn some word formation rules from very few examples. And indeed, human is still able to perfectly learn complex things with very small explanation and/or very few example (something that is totally beyond ML based language models). In my humble opinion, this proves that morphology exists, if not in the LLM matrixes, at least in the human brain. Hence modelling such rules (and even using them to analyse or produce) is a valid approach, independently of any other (also valid) approaches. If I want to say it another way : There has been many scientific proofs that human will not be able to fly… And these proofs were valid under their own hypothesis. Indeed, planes do not flap their wings… they are using other ways to perform a task that was performed by birds. Nevertheless, I have never been the witness of any plane (or pilot) trying to convince birds that their way of flying is obsolete (or issued from a colonialist point of view of Aves on the task at hand…) and asking them to renounce this oh so obsolete bad habit. Regards, Gilles, _______________________________________________ Corpora mailing list -- [email protected] https://list.elra.info/mailman3/postorius/lists/corpora.list.elra.info/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
