Occam's Razor and Bender and Koller's Octopus

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Michael Guerzhoy

Published: 01 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 05 Dec 2024CoRR 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We discuss the teaching of the discussion surrounding Bender and Koller's prominent ACL 2020 paper, "Climbing toward NLU: on meaning form, and understanding in the age of data" \cite{bender2020climbing}. We present what we understand to be the main contentions of the paper, and then recommend that the students engage with the natural counter-arguments to the claims in the paper. We attach teaching materials that we use to facilitate teaching this topic to undergraduate students.