The Noisy Channel and the Braying Donkey
Roberto Basili, Maria Teresa Pazienza, Paola Velardi · 1993
The title of this paper playfully contrasts two rather different approaches to language analysis. The "Noisy Channel" 's are the promoters of statistically based approaches to language learning. Many of these studies are based on the Shannons's Noisy Channel model. The "Braying Donkey" 's are those oriented towards theoretically motivated language models. They are interested in any type of language expressions (such as the famous "Donkey Sentences"), regardless of their frequency in real language, because the focus is the study of human communication.