A computational linguistic farce in three acts
This relates to the big Twitter uproar over this blog post:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@yoav.goldberg&#x2F;an-adversarial-review-of-adversarial-generation-of-natural-language-409ac3378bd7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@yoav.goldberg&#x2F;an-adversarial-review-of-a...</a><p>And here&#x27;s the meat of his response:<p>&gt; Idea! Let&#x27;s go back to toy problems where we can create the test conditions easily, like the rationalists did back then (even if we don&#x27;t realize we are imitating them). After all, Atari is not real life, but it still demonstrates remarkable RL progress. Let&#x27;s make the Ataris of natural language!<p>&gt; But now the rationalists converted to empiricism (with the extra enthusiasm of the convert) complain bitterly. Not fair, Atari is not real life!<p>&gt; Of course it is not. But neither is PTB, nor any of the standard empiricist tasks, which try strenuously to imitate wild language