Textbook of AI

1928–, Linguist, philosopher

Also known as: Avram Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist and philosopher whose 1957 book Syntactic Structures and his earlier MIT doctoral thesis revolutionised linguistics by introducing generative grammar, the project of describing the syntax of natural languages by formal recursive rules. The Chomsky hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, context-sensitive, unrestricted) and its correspondence with classes of automata (finite automata, pushdown automata, linear-bounded automata, Turing machines) gave computer science its formal theory of programming-language syntax and parsing.

In linguistics Chomsky argued for an innate human "language faculty" (the language acquisition device) and against the Skinnerian behaviourism then dominant. His 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior is widely regarded as one of the founding documents of the cognitive revolution that displaced behaviourism in psychology. Successive frameworks, Standard Theory (1965), Government and Binding (1981), Minimalism (1995), extended the generative programme.

For early symbolic AI, the Chomsky hierarchy and the formal techniques of generative grammar provided the mathematical machinery of natural-language parsing for thirty years. The relationship between Chomsky and modern statistical/neural NLP is fraught: Chomsky has been a vocal critic of large-language-model approaches to language, arguing that they describe rather than explain linguistic competence, while LLM researchers note that statistical methods now outperform every Chomsky-style parser ever built. Chomsky has also been a prolific political commentator since the 1960s, with positions sharply critical of US foreign policy.